0:05

You hear that? That's

0:13

the awkward silence of a family dinner after

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you just got caught vaping. Most

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vapes contain high levels of nicotine and

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disappointment. Brought

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to you by The Real Cost and the FDA.

0:29

Just a heads up before we begin, this episode

0:31

contains some adult language.

0:39

When Julian Lucas, now a staff

0:42

writer at The New Yorker, was just a kid, he

0:44

became fascinated by video games.

0:46

I had plenty of late night sleepovers

0:49

playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. It

0:51

was the late 90s, early 2000s, and he

0:54

played all different kinds of games. Fighting

0:56

games and computer games, educational

0:59

games, racing games, and first-person

1:01

shooter games. But there was one kind

1:03

he liked most of all.

1:04

Models of the world. Whether

1:07

it was space exploration

1:09

or conquering the Roman Empire

1:12

or building an ancient Chinese city,

1:15

something that felt like I had an entire

1:17

world contained on my computer

1:20

that I could improvise on

1:22

and modify and control. That's

1:24

what really appealed to me.

1:26

But when Julian got to college, he

1:28

started thinking more critically about this

1:30

medium he loved. At a certain point,

1:33

I realized that so

1:35

many of these games touched on histories

1:38

that should have included slavery and

1:40

just completely omitted

1:42

it.

1:44

The most egregious is probably a game, I mean,

1:47

it's right there in the title. It's Sid Meier's Colonization.

1:50

It was first released in 1991,

1:52

and in it you play a European settler building

1:55

colonies in North America and the Caribbean.

1:57

Actually, when you go to build a sugar

1:59

plant, plantation, the little icon

2:02

for the character that goes and builds it is a

2:04

white woman. She looks like a pilgrim

2:06

or something. And if you could go to cultivate tobacco,

2:09

it's like a guy with a pitchfork and

2:11

a straw hat. In college, I

2:13

really started to think about how egregious

2:15

this was and thinking about the fact that I had had

2:18

ancestors who were enslaved and worked on plantations

2:21

and also just learning how central slavery

2:23

had been to the coming

2:25

of Western modernity and the world

2:27

that we live in. I thought it was just so

2:30

misleading about the shape of history, which

2:33

so many people learned from games like these.

2:35

He began to wonder if any games had

2:37

addressed slavery. And one of the earliest

2:40

I found was called Freedom.

2:43

Freedom, which has an exclamation point at the end,

2:45

is an educational software program released

2:48

in the early 1990s. In

2:50

it, students play as enslaved people in

2:52

the American South in 1830 trying to escape the

2:56

North

2:56

via the Underground Railroad.

2:59

The idea was that by actually putting students

3:01

in the position of runaways, it

3:03

was supposed to sort of bring home a sense

3:07

of the difficulty of that experience

3:09

and also the importance of freedom to

3:11

students.

3:13

When Julian first read about freedom, he was

3:15

excited. Here was a game that

3:17

didn't whitewash history.

3:19

But immediately that enthusiasm

3:22

was tempered by the fact that I saw that this game

3:24

had been the subject of a huge

3:27

controversy. This computer game was supposed

3:29

to help kids study the Underground Railroad.

3:32

You are the slave. You try to gain freedom.

3:34

Is it offensive? So I

3:37

had been looking at this phenomenon totally from

3:39

the standpoint of this is an erased

3:42

history. This is something that game

3:44

designers have been too afraid to incorporate

3:47

into their visions of the past. And immediately

3:49

I was confronted with sort of the opposite. Some parents

3:51

want the game banned from public schools.

3:54

Here's an example of a company that did try

3:56

to include the history of slavery

3:58

in a game.

3:59

and it had blown up in their faces.

4:09

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa

4:11

Paskin.

4:12

Teaching Black history in America has

4:15

always been fraught. But in the

4:17

fall of 1992, a Minnesota-based

4:19

education company released Freedom

4:21

Anyway.

4:22

It was the first ever American computer software

4:24

to take on slavery as its subject, and

4:27

it was sent to one-third

4:28

of the school districts in the nation.

4:30

Less than four months later, it was pulled

4:32

from the market entirely.

4:34

In this episode, we're going to look at

4:36

Freedom, a well-intentioned but flawed

4:39

collaboration that asks students to

4:41

imagine themselves into an historical

4:43

trauma and the consequences that

4:45

ensued. It's a story from 30 years

4:48

ago about a past that isn't

4:50

really past at all. So today

4:52

on Dakota Ring, how did the first

4:55

video game about the Underground Railroad

4:57

wind up in the dustbin

4:58

of history?

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understand how freedom came to be and the

6:02

controversy it caused, we have to get to know

6:04

the three entities most responsible

6:06

for its creation. Two men and

6:08

the company they worked for and

6:10

with. A company which is best known

6:13

for another game entirely.

6:18

When I was growing up,

6:20

everybody would play Oregon Trail

6:22

when they had free time in tech class.

6:29

Oregon Trail is a text based

6:31

educational computer game about westward expansion

6:34

in which you play as a pioneer in 1848

6:38

leading a wagon group on the 2000 plus

6:40

mile

6:40

track from Missouri to Oregon. People

6:43

would name the members of their wagon after

6:45

classmates.

6:46

The gameplay largely involves typing.

6:49

Throughout players are prompted with choices

6:51

about how to proceed, most of which end

6:53

in their deaths. But that's part of

6:55

the fun.

6:56

Everyone would die of dysentery

6:58

or typhoid or be

7:01

killed in some kind of skirmish on the way to

7:03

Oregon and people would shout out, oh, you're dead

7:06

to their classmates.

7:07

Oregon Trail has sold 65 million

7:10

copies. It reached Julian's classroom

7:12

and thousands of others, thanks to the Minnesota

7:15

Educational Computing Consortium

7:18

and later Corporation or simply

7:21

MEC. MEC

7:24

was founded in the early 1970s and

7:26

it was never your typical tech outfit.

7:28

It began as a nonprofit founded by a number

7:30

of Minnesota's educational agencies. It

7:33

was helmed by a former high school math teacher

7:35

and staffed largely by educators who together

7:38

pretty much pioneered the educational

7:40

computer game. MEC made a lot

7:42

of different games, including popular programs

7:45

like Number Munters. But Oregon Trail

7:47

was its best known product, going

7:49

back to when it was played using mainframe computers

7:52

and teletype machines. By the

7:54

early 90s, MEC was distributing its wares

7:56

to the five thousand school districts around

7:58

the country that had a

9:54

the

10:00

Navy and it changed and expanded

10:02

how he saw the world. It

10:04

also got him training in supercomputers.

10:06

While in the Navy, he met a woman from a liberal

10:09

Jewish family in New York. She

10:11

already had a son with a black man who had passed

10:13

away. Rich loved her and the idea

10:15

of building a multicultural family and

10:17

they got married. They moved to Minnesota

10:20

for a job, had two more sons, and

10:22

Rich started taking American history classes

10:24

at the University of Minnesota.

10:26

After a couple of classes

10:29

that dawned on me, they're not

10:31

teaching our history.

10:32

Rich was white. When he says the American

10:35

history classes weren't teaching our history,

10:38

he means they were glossing over uncomfortable

10:40

but true elements of the American past.

10:43

But there were new departments in African

10:45

American and Native American studies that

10:47

he found to be much more

10:49

thorough. Rich would go on to get his

10:51

degree in history and Native studies.

10:54

My parents, along with being interested

10:56

in Native American culture and heritage,

10:59

were really interested in just social

11:01

justice issues. It wasn't enough to just

11:03

give money and they did and they didn't have a lot of money.

11:06

They still gave money to organizations, but

11:08

then they also went out and volunteered.

11:10

By the late 1980s, Rich and his

11:12

family were part of a service-minded multiracial

11:15

community in the Twin Cities. Then

11:17

he got hired by MEC.

11:19

It was like this

11:21

fantasy that came true. He

11:25

was just

11:26

bent over backwards at how cool it was

11:29

and how it employed all of his

11:31

skill sets and interests.

11:32

At first, he consulted on Oregon Trail 2

11:35

and its presentation of Native Americans. He

11:37

made a game called Bluegrass Bluff in which

11:39

the player excavates a Native American archaeological

11:42

site. As Rich got comfortable

11:44

at MEC, he pitched a project inspired

11:47

by a man he'd met while volunteering

11:49

for Minneapolis's annual Juneteenth

11:51

celebration. The man's name

11:53

was Kamau Kambuwe. He is the

11:55

other person most responsible for

11:58

freedom. He was already running

12:00

a real-life, outdoor, underground

12:03

railroad re-enactment in the Twin Cities.

12:06

Here's

12:06

before the Civil War, hundreds of slaves

12:08

made their way to freedom in the North through

12:11

a secret network called the Underground Railroad.

12:14

The Twin Cities man believes the lessons of

12:16

the Underground Railroad are just as

12:18

relevant today as they were generations

12:20

ago. Cheers and a circle

12:23

so that we can begin our program tonight.

12:25

This Kamau Kambuie being featured on a local

12:27

Minneapolis TV station in the early 1990s. A

12:30

dozen kids from St. Paul are about

12:32

to embark on a cultural lesson Kamau

12:35

has already shared with thousands of others.

12:37

You can read in the book what it feels like. You

12:41

can see on the video. But tonight you have

12:43

the opportunity to feel the Underground

12:45

Railroad. Kamau Kambuie would

12:47

lead teenagers

12:48

in the dead of night on a journey from station

12:51

to station through woods, mud

12:53

and other hazards. The students

12:55

would get assistance, advice and medicine

12:57

from re-enactors playing Quakers, Native Americans

13:00

and Harriet Tubman herself, all

13:02

while being pursued by other re-enactors

13:04

acting as slave catchers with guns

13:07

and

13:07

chains and dogs. And

13:09

then in the distance they hear a word that

13:11

has never held more meaning. It

13:16

is now two o'clock in the morning. They

13:18

are tired and shoeless and free. He

13:24

didn't do anything small.

13:25

Kamau died in 1998, but

13:27

five of his seven children got on a Zoom call

13:29

with me recently to talk about their father.

13:32

I know it's a common

13:34

thing now, but

13:36

our dad was the inventor

13:38

of dad jokes. So the

13:41

corniest jokes you

13:43

ever heard. He

13:47

didn't swear. He would say words like,

13:50

he would say doodly squat.

13:51

Kamau

13:53

Kambuie was born Oliver Taylor in

13:56

Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was also raised.

13:58

His children describe him as a born educator

14:01

and font of knowledge with two bachelor's

14:03

degrees who was commanding, meticulous,

14:05

and charming. He was an expert with

14:08

roller skates and weapons and so

14:10

beloved by the community, his sons

14:12

would get jealous of all the other kids who called him dad.

14:15

He was a kind of outdoorsman who would pull

14:17

the car over to give his kids a lesson

14:19

on the various uses of cattails.

14:22

And from a very young age, he

14:24

felt a connection to the Underground

14:26

Railroad. He had a dream

14:28

when he was, I don't know, really young.

14:31

It might have been even 12.

14:32

That's Yemro Kambui Fields, Kamau's

14:34

second oldest son.

14:35

And in that dream, Harriet Tubman actually came

14:37

to him and asked him to help her save

14:40

her people.

14:41

This dream was just one of the things that pushed him

14:43

to immerse himself in Black history and

14:45

the history of slavery and the African

14:47

diaspora. As a student at the

14:49

University of Michigan during the upheavals

14:51

of the 60s and 70s, he became

14:54

involved in Black nationalism.

14:55

He joined an organization called

14:58

the Republic of New Africa, which

15:01

was an offshoot of Malcolm

15:04

X's followers, one of

15:06

the many groups that formed after his

15:08

death.

15:09

Julian Lucas, the New Yorker staff writer

15:11

whose fascination with freedom led him

15:13

to Kamau Kambui.

15:14

And what distinguished the Republic of New

15:16

Africa from the other Black nationalist groups

15:19

is that they wanted to create

15:22

a separate Black nation

15:24

in the Deep South.

15:26

In 1971, Kamau left college

15:28

and moved to Mississippi to join the movement.

15:30

There was a kind of libertarian

15:32

streak to it, almost like a, you

15:35

know, definitely a Second Amendment streak

15:37

to it. Like these were like Black gun owners

15:39

who wanted to become farmers and self-sufficient

15:42

and secede from the United States. It

15:44

obviously didn't go well.

15:46

He was harassed by the FBI and stayed

15:48

in local government. Kamau was arrested for

15:50

licensing a gun under his not yet legal

15:52

name and spent time in jail. When

15:54

he got out, he moved to Minnesota. He trained

15:56

with Outward Bound, which takes young people into

15:59

the wilderness to teach self-sufficiency.

16:01

He also continued to learn about

16:03

the Underground Railroad. Kamau's daughter,

16:06

Mawusi, recalls going with her father to an

16:08

Underground Railroad safe house with a

16:10

trap door in the floor. And he

16:12

had us get in the trap space and we closed

16:15

in.

16:16

So he wanted to feel

16:18

what it was like and he wanted to

16:21

feel it too.

16:22

Beginning in the mid-1980s, he began leading

16:24

black teenagers on the reenactments you

16:26

heard earlier. Quickly, the program

16:29

expanded to include children of all races.

16:32

It was admired as an important homegrown piece

16:34

of multicultural education and

16:36

Kamau was esteemed and celebrated by

16:38

local media, as in this segment

16:40

from Minnesota Public

16:41

Radio.

16:42

I want you to listen, feel,

16:45

taste, smell, hear, and

16:47

call upon your ancestors to deal with you, to

16:49

guide and protect you during this time, so that

16:52

we do not get caught.

16:53

The reenactments could be elaborate and would

16:56

change from night to night. They inspired strong

16:58

and varied feelings, including distress

17:01

and fear. But the group always

17:03

reached freedom eventually and before

17:06

and after there would be conversation,

17:08

explanation, and debrief about what

17:10

had happened and why the experience

17:13

was

17:13

meaningful. I think that

17:15

what develops as a result of that fear and

17:17

conquering that fear is

17:19

to have an appreciation of what ancestors have

17:22

done for us. And

17:25

that's people of every ethnic background.

17:29

In the years to come, with no credit going

17:31

to Kamau, these reenactments would spread

17:33

around the country, not without

17:35

controversy. In non-expert hands,

17:38

they can go really wrong. But

17:40

in Kamau's hands, they became a fixture of

17:42

the Twin Cities community and part of its annual

17:45

Juneteenth celebration. And that's

17:47

how Kamau Kambui met

17:48

Rich Bergeron, the history buff

17:50

who worked at MEC.

17:52

Rich admired Kamau and his work, and

17:54

he started to wonder if the live reenactment might

17:57

not translate into one of the digital reenactments

17:59

that we have. were already Mac's most popular

18:01

products. So Rich

18:03

submitted a proposal for a point-to-point

18:06

simulation about the Underground

18:08

Railroad, and it was approved. He

18:10

immediately approached Kamau about consulting,

18:13

and Kamau was eager to participate. His

18:15

daughter, Nyamka. We remember

18:17

him telling us that it was gonna be a

18:21

game changer, it was very exciting.

18:23

And so Kamau and Rich eagerly embarked

18:25

upon a project they believed was going to

18:28

make a difference. A project

18:30

that would soon prove to be even

18:32

more complicated than they could imagine.

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When

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you make a big purchase, say a car or

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20:16

charitable organizations, and they only direct

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funding to a few of the highest impact

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over 150,000 lives and improve the lives

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as many donors as possible to make informed

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decisions about high-impact giving.

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21:29

Work began on freedom around late 1991. So

21:32

far, I've been referring to it and the products like

21:34

it as games. But the people

21:37

making these products did not

21:39

see them that way.

21:41

They always called it an educational simulation.

21:43

They really rejected the term game.

21:46

I will probably never refer to it as a game. It

21:48

was really intended as a simulation.

21:51

We never, ever call these games.

21:59

Since the early 1990s, video

22:02

games were widely understood at best

22:04

to be something kids did on a home console

22:07

system, where they played as an Italian

22:09

plumber or worse, as a

22:11

moral scourge encouraging violence.

22:14

Even mechs other simulations, like Oregon

22:17

Trail, were often used as recreational

22:19

entertainment by children goofing around

22:21

during computer lab. Few

22:23

people viewed video games as serious

22:26

educational or artistic endeavors.

22:29

But that's exactly what the Freedom team

22:31

wanted to prove they could be.

22:33

It felt like we were doing something new.

22:35

John O'Janon was one of the junior programmers

22:37

on the team Mech assembled to make Freedom,

22:40

and the only one who was willing to speak with me

22:42

on the record.

22:44

Rich was extremely enthusiastic about

22:46

his project.

22:47

He just was infectious about

22:50

these kinds of things. And Kamau, who

22:53

gave us a lot of the ideas, was infectious

22:55

about it as well.

22:56

The Mech team consisted of five

22:58

members. Rich Bergeron was lead designer,

23:00

and he was joined by three programmers and one

23:03

illustrator. All of them were white. Minnesota

23:06

at the time was a very white state, and

23:08

Mech was a very white company. It

23:10

employed about 200 people, and only a handful

23:13

of them were black. Kamau was the simulation's

23:15

consultant, referred to in the credits

23:18

as a naturalist and African-American historian

23:21

who enabled the detail and accuracy

23:24

of the project. The team wanted to

23:26

create an experience like Kamau's

23:28

live reenactments. They wanted to give

23:30

participants a brief window into the

23:33

feelings, the stress, disorientation,

23:36

and danger of being an enslaved

23:38

runaway.

23:40

That was one of the points they wanted

23:42

to get across, was that it was

23:44

really hard to escape.

23:47

To give a sense that this is not something

23:49

that was really a

23:50

game at all. It was a

23:52

struggle. It was a dangerous

23:55

undertaking.

23:56

And they had to convey this intense experience.

23:59

on an Apple II.

24:01

Using an Apple II is very

24:04

easy. The

24:06

only hard part is getting your kid

24:08

away from it.

24:10

An Apple II is a squat beige brick

24:13

of a computer as wide as it is

24:15

deep with a 9-inch screen. Thanks

24:17

largely to an early contract Mac

24:19

made with Apple in the late 1970s, these computers

24:22

were dominant in schools all over

24:25

the country, and it's the system for which

24:27

freedom was designed. By

24:29

the early 1990s, it was no longer

24:31

cutting edge, and the graphics in particular

24:33

were primitive. First of all, you

24:35

only have 16 colors. You can only use eight

24:37

at a time. So depicting race

24:40

is super problematic.

24:42

Mike Palmquist, a former Mac

24:44

employee you heard from earlier, was a member

24:46

of the social studies curriculum team and

24:49

sat in and advised in some of the

24:50

meetings where freedom was approved. And

24:53

number two is there wasn't any

24:55

audio. So all of

24:57

the narration, all of the dialogue

25:00

was written out as displayed

25:02

text.

25:04

The team tried to overcome these limitations as

25:06

best they could. Everything about the gameplay,

25:08

where you would go, who you would meet, what you would

25:10

do, was undergirded

25:11

by research, which

25:13

also arranged for the team and some sales

25:15

reps to go on one of Kamau's reenactments

25:17

to understand what they were trying to create.

25:20

And he corresponded with academic historians

25:22

as well. The Kamau Kambui was

25:25

the principal consultant, and he had thoughts on

25:27

how to address some of these issues.

25:30

Julian Lucas again. He had

25:31

really specific ideas about what was

25:33

important in the history of the

25:36

Underground Railroad that were shaped

25:38

by his life experience as a black

25:40

nationalist.

25:41

People at MEC say this was relevant with regard

25:43

to two aspects of the simulation

25:45

in particular. In their retelling,

25:48

it was important for the characters in the game

25:50

to speak

25:52

in a way that black people in

25:55

the South would have spoken at that time and

25:58

to have defined African

26:00

features, and for him this was

26:03

race pride.

26:05

Enslaved people making their way to freedom

26:07

had done this extremely difficult thing,

26:10

and they had done it as themselves,

26:13

as Africans and the descendants of

26:15

Africans. Kamal thought all of this

26:17

ought to be celebrated and embraced.

26:20

That included by using an approximation

26:23

of 19th century Black speech,

26:26

a dialect which was used for the written dialogue

26:28

of the enslaved characters within

26:31

freedom. It was a striking choice

26:33

that would go on to attract a lot of attention,

26:36

but it wasn't the only notable aspect

26:38

of the simulation.

26:40

So in freedom you start out on

26:42

a plantation.

26:43

That plantation could be in Delaware, Maryland,

26:46

or Virginia. The character could be a

26:48

man or a woman, and they would have some

26:50

randomly generated qualities, like

26:53

some avatars might come with a compass,

26:55

some could read, and others could not.

26:58

If your avatar was illiterate, an indecipherable

27:00

glyph font would be used for place names within

27:03

the simulation.

27:04

The first thing you do is speak

27:07

to

27:09

other enslaved people on the plantation.

27:11

Elders in the community of the

27:13

enslaved gives you something, whether

27:16

it's a piece of advice or an object that's going

27:18

to help you on your journey. Immediately

27:20

you're in a kind of wilderness.

27:23

You have to navigate by using

27:25

the stars and by

27:28

using moss on trees and seeing where

27:30

the Big Dipper is. And

27:33

as you move through the map of

27:35

the game, you encounter all kinds

27:37

of obstacles. You have to cross rivers,

27:39

you might enter a town, and you have to make a decision

27:42

about are they gonna be someone who's sympathetic,

27:44

or are they going to call the patrollers and send

27:46

me back to slavery. You hunt and

27:48

fish, and periodically you encounter

27:51

slave patrols, and

27:53

you have to confront them, run

27:55

away from them, attempt to hide. You can

27:58

also try to fight

28:00

them.

28:01

The first time Julian, who is an experienced

28:04

gamer, sat down to try Freedom, it

28:06

took him seven tries and two hours

28:09

to succeed. Far more time than most

28:11

students would ever have in a computer lab

28:13

in one sitting. By the summer

28:15

of 1992, Freedom was ready

28:17

to be playtested on actual students

28:19

in grades five through nine and

28:21

by their

28:22

teachers too.

28:23

Freedom came with a 60-plus page

28:25

user manual that contained instructions

28:27

for the simulation, a multi-page

28:30

historical primer, and a bibliography

28:32

that referenced more than 70 sources. Teachers

28:36

following the manual were instructed to address

28:38

potentially controversial and confusing

28:40

aspects of the game with their students beforehand,

28:43

including things like the simulation's dialect.

28:46

Rich Bergeron also informally tested

28:49

Freedom on additional black educators

28:51

and academics. One college history

28:53

professor he invited to review it is

28:57

that the one Kamau Kambuie is doing? If

28:59

it's all right for Kamau, it's all right

29:01

for me. I don't need to see it.

29:04

Rich himself told a St. Paul paper he

29:06

was expecting different reactions from

29:08

different racial groups, elaborating

29:10

that some white people don't want to be reminded

29:13

of how their ancestors treated black people.

29:16

Quote, they would rather gloss over it

29:18

than talk about it. Around

29:20

October 1992, Metz began

29:23

releasing Freedom to the one third

29:25

of school districts in the country that had

29:28

a MEC membership. There

29:30

were so many puzzle pieces that came together.

29:32

Josh Bergeron, Rich Bergeron's son. They

29:35

got support from the organization. The

29:37

team was put together. I think

29:39

they really, truly felt with the

29:41

curriculum all of this was going

29:44

to make a difference. He really wanted it to

29:46

be larger than life. Yamro Fields,

29:48

Kamau Kambuie's son. This was his,

29:51

you know, part of, anyway, his legacy.

29:53

This is something that he wanted to, you

29:55

know, hand down for his grandchildren.

29:58

In the weeks after Freedom's release. Things

30:00

seem to be going well. Rich told Julian

30:03

Lucas the team received a letter from a Catholic

30:05

school in Alabama. The teachers had been looking

30:07

through the manual, planning to write and

30:09

complain about the topic. But

30:11

had found the whole instructional packet so

30:14

well put together, they decided instead

30:16

to use Freedom in their curriculum. A

30:19

capsule review in a software catalog

30:21

called Freedom one of the hottest new

30:23

Apple II titles on the market and

30:25

said it does a quote impressive job

30:27

in spite of the mediums limitations.

30:30

In November of 1992, MEC

30:33

made Freedom the complementary program

30:35

at its annual conference, free to anybody

30:37

who wanted a copy. And yet

30:39

things were not going quite as smoothly

30:41

as all the public accolades made it seem,

30:44

even at that annual MEC conference,

30:47

as Rich explained to Julian Lucas.

30:50

We had generally

30:53

pretty welcoming attitude that we saw

30:56

from teachers, from

30:58

black folks. We

31:00

had one man, he came

31:02

in and he watched for a while and then he started

31:05

screaming and shouting about it. This

31:08

is absolutely horrifying. I'm

31:10

going to do my best to pull this off the market.

31:14

Around the same time, an email chain

31:16

was forwarded to MEC from a group of black

31:18

computer programmers horrified by

31:20

the very premise, comparing it to

31:22

making a game about the Holocaust or Jeffrey

31:25

Dahmer. A black teacher in Texas

31:27

wrote in asking for the game to be pulled

31:30

and she was not dissuaded by a response

31:32

assuring her that a black man had been a key

31:34

advisor on the project. The

31:37

Freedom team began to work on an updated

31:39

version of the simulation with better

31:41

graphics and sound, hoping

31:44

to address some

31:44

of these concerns.

31:47

But before they could, Freedom

31:49

reached a school in Indiana.

32:00

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33:04

Hello there. Hi, this is Willa Paskin.

33:06

I was just turning your call again. Yes,

33:08

hey Willa. Thanks so much for calling

33:11

me back. I really appreciate it. Can you

33:13

imagine my shock

33:19

of your text message?

33:21

That's Darylyn Sharp. I cold texted

33:23

her after coming across her name in a news article

33:25

about freedom.

33:27

She was born and raised in Gary,

33:29

Indiana. And when she was just a little

33:32

girl in the 1960s, it was a booming steel town.

33:35

Her family was affluent, politically minded and

33:37

well-connected. Darylyn became one of the first black

33:40

loan officers in the area, underwriting

33:42

mortgages for black homebuyers who

33:44

had been historically discriminated against.

33:47

I tried to make a difference. I

33:49

had to make a difference, you know, and letting

33:51

my clients know, look, you can buy any house. If

33:54

I qualify you and say you're approved, you

33:56

can buy any house. I have to stay in this red line

33:59

district.

34:00

Gary, even more than other cities across

34:03

the country, got hollowed out by white flight,

34:05

urban decay and manufacturing decline.

34:08

By the 1980s, the city was well on its

34:10

way to losing half of its population,

34:13

including to suburbs like Merrillville, Indiana,

34:16

which abuts Gary directly to the South.

34:19

We moved from Gary to Merrillville.

34:22

I moved in search of a better

34:25

school system for the kids. It

34:27

was

34:27

a predominantly white school district with an

34:29

increasing number of black students, and it

34:31

was tense.

34:31

They would do things like trail

34:34

our kids home to make sure

34:36

that they lived in the school

34:39

district, literally.

34:42

Darrylyn was brought in soon after her son

34:44

transferred and told he should be held back,

34:47

an experience that other black families

34:49

also went through. A team coach didn't

34:52

want his players having cornrows or braids

34:54

in their hair. There was no black history

34:56

taught and very few black teachers.

34:57

It was a clear racial

35:00

divide. It was very clear. It was very

35:02

obvious.

35:03

And then one night in very early 1993, her

35:06

family was sitting around the dinner table when

35:08

her son Byron, who was 11 years old at

35:10

the time, started peppering his older

35:12

sister with questions.

35:15

He and his sister are talking, and

35:17

he's saying, what

35:19

kind of game is it that you

35:21

can win and the

35:24

dogs is chasing you and

35:26

they got

35:26

a noose on the tree

35:29

to hang you. And if you go

35:31

into the swamp, the dogs can find

35:33

you and chase you out. And

35:35

I was talking, what are you talking about?

35:38

And he said, this is a game that

35:40

I'm playing at school. What

35:43

kind of game is this? And

35:46

he said, it's some freedom game.

35:48

We had computer time

35:51

and they let us play it.

35:52

I reached Darryl and son Byron

35:54

Sharp on the phone when he was at work. That's

35:57

like my second time playing it. I'm

35:59

like, this shit ain't right.

36:00

What about it in particular, like,

36:03

made you know that?

36:04

The choices that you had to make, like

36:07

you had to make split decision choices, they

36:09

would be like run up a tree

36:12

or

36:13

like hide yourself from the swamp. Either

36:15

way you picked, you're still getting caught.

36:18

What about that seemed like so fucked

36:20

up? Excuse my language. You gotta understand,

36:23

you're eight, nine years old

36:25

and you realize that your answer is just

36:28

a card.

36:29

As a kid, Byron knew about

36:31

slavery. This was a topic and history

36:34

that was discussed in his household.

36:37

That's actually part of the reason he brought it up at dinner. Something

36:40

about it seemed off compared to what

36:42

he already knew. So

36:43

you're telling me I can make this decision

36:46

and go to jail

36:48

or fuck my shit up for the rest of my life. Either

36:51

way it went, he was going down and some

36:53

people were going through that down.

36:55

In the live reenactments led by Kamau

36:57

Kambuie, the participants always reached

36:59

freedom. The journey could be harrowing

37:01

and scary and hard, but

37:04

the participants succeeded and

37:06

in so doing were supposed to appreciate

37:09

themselves and the much harder

37:11

experience of Kamau put it, their

37:13

ancestors. But in freedom,

37:15

the simulation, you didn't always

37:18

succeed. In fact, you failed

37:20

most of the time and it wasn't

37:22

the meaningless dying of Super Mario

37:25

Brothers or even Oregon Trail.

37:28

Instead, you get turned in, killed,

37:31

returned to slavery. As

37:34

Byron and I talked, it became clear that

37:36

the problem wasn't that the simulation

37:38

was trying to teach this gruesome and

37:40

difficult and important

37:41

history.

37:42

A history he and his mother

37:45

want to be taught is

37:47

that it didn't even then feel like it was

37:49

about history. It felt

37:52

like a hopeless metaphor for

37:54

how his school, how his country

37:57

saw his future.

37:58

Hell yeah.

37:59

It was real life.

38:01

It's why 30 years later, this experience

38:04

dropped on him when he was just 11 years

38:07

old in the middle of computer class is

38:10

still so vivid.

38:11

That's why we had to do something about

38:13

it, because I could not believe

38:16

that they were introducing those kinds

38:18

of feelings. Darlyn knew

38:20

what she had to do.

38:22

I went to the school the very next day.

38:24

Don't hesitate. She was on the

38:27

PTA and she knew the principal, who assured

38:29

her it was just part of the curriculum. But

38:31

Darlyn asked to see it for herself. And

38:33

it was as Byron described. And

38:36

I'm like, you're not going to play this game

38:37

anymore. My kid is not. No, you're

38:39

not playing this game at this school anymore.

38:42

And so then from that point,

38:44

I just started rallying. She started

38:46

reaching out to the other black parents who were hearing

38:49

from their own kids about freedom. Some

38:51

third and fourth graders unsupervised

38:53

in the computer lab had even been teased

38:55

by

38:55

older white boys.

38:57

The older boys had made fun of the dialect and

38:59

freedom and referred to the rudimentary images

39:02

as Aunt Jemima's. The boys had gone

39:04

home in tears. None of these

39:06

parents knew about Mac or Kamau

39:09

Kambui or Rich Bergeron

39:11

and their ambitions or intentions.

39:13

They just knew they had to do something.

39:16

You just don't put something like that

39:18

out there and expect us to be OK

39:21

with it. This is

39:23

not a game. This is not

39:25

a game.

39:30

I got a telephone call from

39:32

the CBS affiliate in Chicago

39:35

asking for a statement. Dean Kephart,

39:38

an educator who has worked and continues to

39:40

work at nonprofits, was the director of communications

39:43

at Mac at the time.

39:44

And I had no idea what had

39:47

transpired in Maraville.

39:49

By the time he got off the phone with the Chicago

39:52

station, it was clear to him that a lot

39:54

of things Mac had not foreseen had

39:56

happened. But as he talked to an adviser,

39:59

he realized. Mac's intentions didn't

40:01

really matter.

40:03

I tested my thinking with her, and

40:05

she said, Dean, there is no win here. You're

40:09

going to have to

40:11

swallow the mistake and

40:14

apologize and pull it from the marketplace.

40:16

If you enter into this debate, you're

40:19

going to lose. You're looking

40:21

at two little boys who

40:23

are crying, and their parents are

40:26

blowing the whistle. I mean, that

40:28

is not what you want to see on

40:31

the evening news.

40:34

It ended up on the news anyway.

40:36

In Merrillville, Indiana, some parents want

40:38

the game banned from public schools. They

40:40

find this, for example, to be offensive.

40:43

Do you have anything to help me? You

40:46

give me some advice. I can read your

40:48

action, chili. You going to run?

40:50

What the newscaster is reading here is

40:52

the written text that enslaved characters

40:55

used in the simulation. The

40:57

same text that had also been used to make

41:00

black children in the classroom cry.

41:03

And once it was out in the world, all sorts of

41:05

design choices and compromises Mac

41:07

had made for technology and authenticity's

41:10

sake were revealed as liabilities.

41:13

The graphics may have been hamstrung by the

41:15

Apple II's limitations, but they still

41:18

appeared to be minstrel-like caricatures

41:19

of black people.

41:21

Yes, there was a detailed manual,

41:24

but teachers used to letting their students play

41:26

Mac's other games without supervision

41:29

didn't use it. The difficulty

41:31

of the simulation, without instruction,

41:33

and in the context of America's vast

41:35

racial tensions, wasn't creatively

41:37

disorienting or inspiring. It

41:40

was dispiriting and maybe pointless.

41:42

Mac wanted to push the boundaries of educational

41:45

software, but their ambition alone

41:47

couldn't overcome adult skepticism

41:49

about the triviality of video games.

41:52

And a nearly all-white company couldn't

41:55

expect the input of one black consultant,

41:57

however well-informed and impassioned.

42:00

to stand in for the perspectives and

42:02

experiences of millions of black

42:04

students and parents. And

42:06

that same company had no moral

42:09

authority to stick up for the product,

42:11

to say, well, try to make it better when

42:14

black parents complained. And

42:16

so just hours after being approached for a

42:18

comment, Dean Kephart made a

42:20

decision releasing a statement

42:22

to the media.

42:24

I just said, our intent was not

42:26

to hurt children and ask

42:28

that all copies be either

42:30

destroyed or sent back.

42:32

The incident in Merrillville spread to schools

42:34

and newspapers and radio stations across

42:37

the country. Just the idea

42:39

of it was galling. Parents described

42:41

it as a disgrace that Nintendoized

42:44

the most serious of histories.

42:47

The abrupt downfall of the product sent those who had

42:49

worked on it and had such high hopes

42:51

for it reeling.

42:53

It was traumatic for a lot of people. There

42:55

was a little bit of mourning and a little bit of, you

42:57

know,

42:59

not guilt, but, you know, responsibility.

43:03

It was very deflating. They had just worked so

43:05

hard on this and tried to be so

43:08

thorough and careful about it.

43:10

It was definitely something that he was quite disappointed

43:12

in. It was just heartbroken.

43:15

The controversy around freedom took some

43:17

time to die down, though the company's swift

43:20

decision to halt the game did help

43:22

contain it. In 1995,

43:24

a copy of freedom that had not been destroyed

43:27

was used in an Arizona computer classroom

43:29

again to harass and humiliate a

43:31

black student whose parents sued the school

43:34

district. That same year, Mac would

43:36

be sold to a larger software company,

43:39

the first in a number of sales that would result

43:41

just a few years later in Mac's closure.

43:45

Josh Bergeron says that making freedom and

43:47

working at Mac was the pinnacle of his father

43:49

rich's career. After the company

43:51

folded, Rich floated for a long time, trying

43:54

to find work he found as

43:55

meaningful.

43:58

We as a family.

44:01

definitely had this residual

44:03

of like, what if? What if that had been successful?

44:06

Rich Bergeron himself told Julian Lucas

44:09

that if he could do it all over again, he would have waited

44:11

a few years for the technology that was about

44:14

to be available with 256

44:17

colors, photography, and sounds.

44:19

Technology that MEC integrated into

44:22

its future trail products. As

44:24

for Kamau Kambui, according to his

44:26

children, even after freedom was

44:28

pulled, he tried to repackage it,

44:30

change its name, update its software,

44:33

and get it placed in stores. His

44:35

daughter, Nayamka, he

44:37

just ran out of time.

44:47

Kamau Kambui died when he was only 50. You

44:50

can still participate in his Underground Railroad

44:52

reenactment in Minnesota, where they are

44:55

now run by the Kamau Kambui circle

44:57

for cultural learning. In

45:00

the 30 years since freedom's release, the people who

45:02

worked on and around it have had a lot of

45:04

time to think about it. Some still

45:06

believe freedom could have done a lot of good if it had

45:08

been given the support to iterate and improve.

45:11

Others have come to think of it as impossibly

45:14

flawed. Some are proud of it. Some

45:16

are ashamed. Some are still too nervous

45:18

to talk about it. They do almost

45:21

all agree on one thing, though.

45:23

Even an updated version would

45:25

still be controversial

45:26

today. Florida

45:28

schools must now teach students about

45:30

the quote, benefit of slavery

45:32

when teaching black history, the controversial

45:35

new education standard. Because teaching about slavery,

45:37

about black history, about American

45:39

history, in whatever medium, has

45:42

only become more fraught since

45:44

freedom tried and failed to

45:47

do so.

45:48

It was highly, highly imperfect,

45:51

yes, but

45:53

can we really say that something better

45:55

has replaced it?

46:16

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.

46:19

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to

46:21

decode, please email us at decoderring

46:24

at slate.com. This

46:26

episode was written by Willa Paskin.

46:28

I produced Decoder Ring with Katie Shepard.

46:31

This episode was also produced by Benjamin

46:33

Frisch. This episode was edited by

46:36

Erica Morrison. Derek John is

46:38

executive

46:38

producer. Joel Meyer is senior

46:41

editor producer. And Merit Jacob is senior

46:43

technical director.

46:45

I want to give an enormous thank

46:47

you to Julian Lucas for his expertise,

46:49

reporting, and generosity without

46:52

which this episode would not have been possible.

46:55

I also want to direct you to an article he wrote for The

46:57

New Yorker, Can Slavery Reenactment

46:59

Set Us Free?, which explores more

47:01

specifically the history and complicated

47:03

present of the live Underground Railroad

47:06

reenactments that Kamau Kambui

47:08

pioneered.

47:09

I'd also like to thank Jesse Fuchs for suggesting

47:12

this topic. Thank you also to Coventry

47:14

Cowans, Bridget Fielder, Bob Whitaker,

47:16

Alan Wissman, Wayne Studer, Alicia

47:19

Montgomery, Rebecca Onion, Luke

47:21

Winky, and the children of Kamau Kambui

47:23

who spoke with me. Yamro

47:24

Kambui Fields, Halim

47:26

Fields, Mausi Kambui Pierre,

47:29

Nayamka Sally, and Kamau Sebabu

47:31

Kambui Jr. If you haven't

47:33

yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple

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Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

47:39

And even better, tell your friends. And

47:41

if you're a fan of the show, I'd really like you to sign

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ads, and their support is crucial to

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47:51

work. So please go to slate.com slash

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47:55

Plus today. That's it for this season.

47:58

Be well.

48:11

Hey everybody, it's Tim Heidecker. You know me, Tim

48:13

and Eric, bridesmaids, and Fantastic

48:16

Four. I'd like to personally invite you

48:18

to listen to Office Hours Live with me and my

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48:23

And Vic Berger. Howdy. Every

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It's live. We have a room called. We

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