Harriet Tubman was a resistance leader against a system designed to control physical/mental domination and oppression. She was named the conductor of the ‘Underground Railroad’. This was a no choice situation where once she achieved freedom felt in her soul compelled to free her loved ones by any means necessary.
Looking into the face of Harriet Tubman showed the determination to succeed under grave circumstances where enslaved people were afraid. She coped with their fear of cruelty imposed by those who had enslaved them, their desire to escape to an unknown freedom, and the challenges of survival risked possible return to slavery. Her face represents intolerance and compassion at once. Intolerance for those not wanting freedom enough to trust her to take them to freedom and compassion for those who were desperate to escape with their families for a better life.
Quick clips on her story: Harriet was born into slavery as Aramita (Minty) Ross in March of 1822 over two hundred years ago in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was a devoutly religious person inspired by the brutality of beatings as a slave escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 at 27 years old. Her first attempt to escape was with her brothers who became fearful enough then turned back dragging her into the savagery of slavery. The second time she fled alone for her freedom. Tubman’s focus on going back to Maryland was freeing her relatives along with others who desired to escape slavery. She became clandestine traveling by night ‘never losing a passenger’. To ensure a sustainable freedom, her route on the ‘Underground railroad’ led further north to Canada, where she helped ‘freed people’ find paid jobs. This determination connected her in 1858 as recruiter for John Brown’s bold raid of Harpers Ferry. This attack on a federal weapons’ arsenal included helping enslaved people given bayonets to fight for their freedom. Tubman worked with the Union Army as ‘a cook, a nurse moving on to an armed scout and spy’. Her knowledge and trusted guidance as part of the raid at Combahee Ferry, liberated 700 enslaved people. Her status had become established as the first woman to have led a military operation in the ‘United States’. After the Civil War Harriet was active in the women’s suffrage movement and left due to illness. However, African American women like herself did not receive their rights to vote until a 1963 under the Voting Rights Act. Harriet Tubman purchased land in Auburn, New York, cared for her aging parents, had married twice (leaving one on her final escape to freedom), and due to illness spent her last days (until death in 1913) in a facility she helped establish for elderly African Americans.
Harriet Tubman left us in the 20th Century in March 1913 about 112 years ago. We are experiencing ‘Black History Month 2025’ in American where a resurgence of economic pressures, rollbacks of rights, and an unreliable constitutional government. Harriet Tubman lived through the civil war, end of slavery, reconstruction, into Jim Crow lynchings. It took a resurgence through the Civil Rights movement to keep forcing the constitution’s promise for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ She did that then, what are we prepared to do now to keep our democracy in 2025?
Author and Artist done by Lillian L. Thompson of Lillianonline.us