Juneteenth and the Radical Abolitionist Harriet Tubman

On April 27, 1860, Harriet Tubman, with a group of activist abolitionists, coordinated the rescue of Charles Nalle. A fugitive of slavery, Nalle made way from Virginia to Troy, New York, where federal marshals and police captured him. Tubman disguised herself as an elderly woman, and the back and forth between slave catchers and the Troy community included a gun battle and an escape by riverway. At the end of the events, Tubman and the community helped raise the funds to purchase and ensure Nalle’s freedom.

So, in the midst of the historic everyday heroism of an extraordinary woman, who would have thought that so close to Juneteenth—a holiday celebrating the formal abolition of slavery and commemorating the liberation of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, three months after in the end of the US Civil War—that I would be writing to prove Harriet Tubman’s existence.

Juneteenth and abolition celebrations are the core of the history, triumph, and resilience of Harriet Tubman and Black ancestors in the United States and the Western Hemisphere who survived and fought to end formal chattel slavery.

Tubman has been the target of such unnecessary animosity and hate for dreaming of a world that still does not truly exist, but that many activists who have taken on her vision are still fighting for. She was a radical abolitionist who fought for her liberation, the liberation of her community, and all Black people in her midst. The problem too many people have with Tubman is her legacy.

Just like the hundreds of Underground Railroad “conductors” she trained at the height of the abolitionist movement, presently, there are millions of modern-day abolitionists and activists just like her throughout the world who work every day for sustainability, community, and question and fight against systems of supremacy and tyranny. She refused to meet with Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War when he and others introduced a scheme for the mass deportation of formerly enslaved and free Black communities. She stood on business and did not deviate from the full freedom and liberation of her people.

This piece is a response to the “haters.” Kanye West (of course); the white woman who is suing a public library for not allowing her one-woman-show of Tubman’s and other notable Black women's lives (wtf); the US government for taking down information about Tubman from the official National Park Services website; the random people on Harriet Tubman’s internet saying she is as real as the Easter Bunny (what the helly…); even the writers of the 2019 Harriet film that misrepresented Harriet Tubman’s story (60% fiction); people advocating to place her image on the 20 dollar bill (she wanted REPARATIONS not representation…); the political wannabes that use her sacred name in vain; and the countless history textbooks that limited her story to a simple byline, “Harriet Tubman freed slaves.”

Harriet Tubman stood about five feet tall. She was a disabled, formerly enslaved Black woman without the ability to read and write. There is no mystery to Tubman’s story; however, the power of her liberatory narrative is continuously silenced and repressed.

The photo was taken in the 1860s. This is the earliest known photo of Tubman available. Via Smithsonian.

The popular culture-dominated byline “Harriet Tubman freed slaves”, no matter how grandiose, limits Tubman’s life and impact to solely the period of U.S. chattel slavery, shrouding six decades of contributions. Additionally, the “how”, “who”, “where”, and even “why” are omitted from Tubman’s temporally abrupt and unclear popular culture narrative. This popular narration obscures the historical traditions of maroonage, self-emancipation, resistance, and community that allowed generations of Black people to fight against and survive within the confines of an expanding system of chattel slavery in the United States and the Americas as a whole.

In North America, the Underground Railroad consisted of simple routes that created complex networks. These networks and acts of resistance answer the question of “how” Tubman successfully escaped bondage in 1850, a first attempt with her brothers, then by herself. She was one of the 259 persons who successfully escaped Maryland that year, and in 1852, she returned to help other Black community members. Answering the “who” and “where”, Tubman rescued family members and a network of people she knew from the eastern shore of Maryland, a slave state situated at the border of the Mason-Dixon line, navigating the stars as a compass and traversing riverways, forests, and swamps.

Underground Railroad (Wikipedia Public Domain)

Although the number of Black people that self-emancipated with Tubman during her thirteen trips to Maryland is limited to about 80 persons, this number does not include those able to emancipate during her activities in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, or the residual impact of Underground Railroad “conductors” that trained under or were inspired by Tubman to become grassroots abolitionists. With enslaved Black people asserting personhood and community by becoming “fugitives”, the “why” is tainted in the racial scientific white supremacist logic of Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 discovery of “drapetomania,” a mental illness disease attributed to Black people who escaped slavery.

The “Slave Power” ideology was based on the inhumane characterization of Black people, which strengthened the continuation of domestic human trafficking of enslaved people to the Deep South and the circum-Caribbean. These terrifying circumstances and pressure increased the calculated attempts for self-emancipation to escape the brutal system of chattel slavery, personally or communally experienced. Tubman sought to self-emancipate with her brothers in 1849, after becoming aware of a pending sale to the Deep South. Additionally, the expansion and protection of slavery by the U.S. Congress through the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act pushed the urge to escape. Simultaneously, calcifying networks of activists, advocates, and free and self-emancipated Black communities committed to supporting enslaved Black people in self-liberation.

Simple versions of Harriet Tubman’s story add to basic representations of U.S. slavery. However, her expansive role as a grassroots abolitionist, radical activist, undocumented person, exiled refugee, borderlands traveler, antebellum military organizer, nurse and healer, Civil War leader and military veteran, Black liberation activist, women's rights activist, and post-emancipation and Great Migration humanitarian becomes shrouded in obscurity.

Let’s talk about Harriet Tubman as the “Moses of her People” (what the people called her) and “General Tubman” (what John Brown named her). In addition to the fluxes of highs and lows implicit in Tubman’s story, the circumstances surrounding the publications of her biographies from 1856 to 1886 reveal socio-political moments of enslavement, Civil War, and Reconstruction at the base of transforming and dangerous narratives of U.S. slavery and the Civil War.

Araminta “Minty” Ross

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross around 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, on the eastern shore. She and her family were enslaved by the white Pattisons, the Thompsons, the Stewarts, and the Brodesses. Harriet’s father, Ben Ross, was manumitted by a provision in Anthony Thompson’s will in 1840, while her mother Harriet and siblings remained enslaved. Recently freed and his family in bondage, Ben possibly continued to labor for the Thompsons, and then he hired himself to the Stewarts.

In slavery, Tubman suffered brutal and countless abuses as a child and youth. At 6 years old, she labored in swamps securing muskrat traps, and she also played domestic and night nurse to a newborn. In both of these roles, Tubman was whipped, beaten, and battered.

As a teen, while helping a fellow enslaved Black man, Tubman was “inadvertently” knocked down by a white enslaver and fell into a coma. From that time, she suffered seizures, visions, and blackouts, now diagnosed as temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). These episodes became a part of the mysticism of Tubman as a figure comparable to Joan of Arc. She connected these occurrences to her relationship with God and spirituality. As she became older, Tubman was able to hire out her time and work closely with her father, logging with the Stewart family. Harriet married John Tubman, a free Black man, in 1844.

Upon hearing that she might be sold down South, in September 1849, Harriet attempted to escape with her two brothers, but they were not successful. Eliza Ann Brodess arranged a reward of 300 dollars (equivalent to 9,000 dollars today) for their capture.

In addition to Tubman’s family losing two sisters to domestic human trafficking of enslaved Black people, instead of manumitting enslaved people (as Tubman’s father and husband were), it was a common practice for enslavers to “legally” and illegally sell Black men, women, and children down South to growing cotton and sugar plantations in Texas and Louisiana — kidnappings were also a common occurrence in the North and South. Family separation was the greatest fear during this period.

In the winter of 1849/1850, Tubman left on her own (as her husband refused to leave with her) and she successfully made it to Philadelphia with the help of the Underground Railroad network of free Black communities, Quakers, and other white abolitionists.

As she was “Minty Ross” in the eastern shore, she changed her name to “Harriet (her mother’s first name) Tubman (her husband’s last name)” upon freedom.

Tubman in 1887 (far left), with her husband Davis (seated, with cane), their adopted daughter Gertie (beside Tubman), Lee Cheney, John “Pop” Alexander, Walter Green, “Blind Aunty” Sarah Parker, and her great-niece Dora Stewart at Tubman’s home in Auburn, New York (Wikipedia Public Domain)

Slavery and Self-Emancipation

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, enacted as a part of the Compromise of 1850 during the period of U.S. slavery, buttressed the system of searching for, detaining, retrieving, and returning “runaway slaves”—self-emancipated black people or fugitives from chattel slavery—from free states to slave states.

Fugitives from chattel slavery were undocumented, as they did not have the coveted “freedom papers” or were not manumitted through legal channels. The law also provided financial resources to state and local politicians and newly formed police forces, and it made the public culpable for harboring fugitives or failing to physically assist in their pursuit. This history is the foundation of modern-day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Border Patrol. And Tubman and radical abolitionists fought like hell against them.

Additionally, the law attempted to dismantle the interracial network of antislavery advocates and abolitionist activists of the Underground Railroad, led by luminaries such as William Still, Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles, and Sarah Parker Redmond, who provided resources, once self-emancipate,d and clandestine routes to free states for Black people fleeing the South. Black and abolitionist communities in northern free states were outraged and protested the law.

These networks, along with longstanding Black communities in general, worked to create safe spaces for self-emancipated exiled communities—sanctuary cities, towns, neighborhoods, and/or blocks. They established Vigilance Committees that fought against the US Marshals, citizen “slave catchers,” and newly formed local police forces that were granted the authority and financial incentives to terrorize Black communities.

The 1850 law demonstrates the parallels and systemic alignment of borders, systemic and financial incentives for criminalizing Black people, and activism around protecting exiled/refugee communities. Harriet Tubman and growing communities of self-emancipated Black people were undocumented people, exiles, and refugees fleeing Southern slave states and then the U.S. for Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean for “freedom”.

As the local enactment of the law increased, self-emancipated Black people looked to Underground Railroad (UGRR) organizations for support. Tubman participated in abolitionist and refugee organizations, such as the Fugitive Aid Society, supporting the immediate transition of self-emancipated Black people from enslavement to freedom.

Upon hearing about the pending sales of family and friends from Maryland to the deep South, she began to venture to the eastern shore and surrounding areas as an Underground Railroad “conductor” moving “cargo” to communities in upstate New York and then St. Catharines, Canada. As a conductor, Tubman was notorious for her disguises, omniscient spirituality, geographic knowledge of swamp and backwoods terrain, mathematical and scientific cosmological knowledge, deep understanding of astronomy, and outright bravery.

She gained an impressive reputation as an emancipator known as “Moses” by the Black communities in the Mid-Atlantic region, Northern states, and Canada. Although her parents, Ben and Rit Ross, were manumitted, Harriet’s activities in the UGRR put them at risk under the Fugitive Slave Law. She rescued her parents from Maryland and brought them to Canada. In addition to working as a domestic, she began to fundraise, giving speeches on the abolitionist circuits for her trips South. Among enslavers, Tubman also had a reputation, and a reward of 12,000 dollars (some historians estimate as much as 40,000 dollars) was offered for her capture.

Tubman’s narrative was first published as part of an accumulation of edited interviews by Benjamin Drew in The Refugee: or North-Side View of Slavery. Published in 1856, Drew’s piece countered George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society and Reverend Nehemiah Adams’s A Southside View of Slavery. In vogue with Samuel Cartwright’s “drapetomania” logic, Fitzhugh and Adams both argued that slavery was beneficial and less oppressive than the northern wage-labor system.

Both claimed that enslaved Black people were content in the South, directly challenging Harriet Beecher Stowe’s description of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Fitzhugh and Adams challenge northern abolitionists’ claims about the horrors of slavery as only emotional and without merit. Through interviews with Canadian refugees, such as Tubman and her family members, Drew sought to buttress the fictive narrative of slavery by Stowe and autobiographical slave narratives with anecdotes from an entire self-emancipated community.

In Drew’s interview with Tubman, she recounts:

“I grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented: every time I saw a white man, I was afraid of being carried away. I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang — one of them left two children. We were always uneasy. Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave. I have no opportunity to see my friends in my native land. We would rather stay in our native land if we could be as free there as we are here. I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell, if he could.”

The first-hand account of Tubman and her community contradicts the notion of contentment in slavery. The book exposes the inhumanity of the domestic trade that indiscriminately separated families, sending them deep South and to new territories to join brutal “chain gangs.” Most importantly, Tubman describes the United States as “our native land,” showing a willingness to return to the states but not the “dreadful condition (of) slavery.”

Drew’s title describes self-emancipated communities as “refugees,” directly supporting the notion of a U.S. homeland. Recent biographer Kate Clifford Larson notes that although Tubman was part of the clandestine UGRR network, she chose to be known by her real and chosen name for the book, Harriet Tubman.

In addition to the power of her short contribution, Drew’s narrative depicts the intense conflict between abolitionists and proslavery segments, adding to the impending crisis that officially started the U.S. Civil War in 1861.

General Harriet Tubman: Civil War

In early 1858, white radical abolitionist John Brown traveled to St. Catherine’s, Canada, from Boston to meet with Harriet Tubman and Black community members about his plan to lead an insurrection in the South and establish a new free state for emancipated Black people in the mountains of Virginia and western Maryland.

Prominent abolitionists and Underground Railroad operators Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and Jermain W. Loguen advised Brown to connect with Tubman, who had just left Boston after fundraising and speaking engagements. Brown anticipated that her authority on the communication and transport lines on the Underground Railroad would provide an advantage for the assault on Harpers Ferry.

In addition to sharing his plans and consulting on the draft constitution for a provisional U.S. government with Douglass, Brown visited with his core group of activists—the Secret Six (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns)—who knew about Brown’s plans for an armed raid and provided funds and connections.

In a letter to his son the next day, Brown described that his meeting with Tubman went beyond his expectations. Referring to her as “General,” he wrote that she was “the most of a man… that I ever met with.” With the raid in planning, Tubman returned to Boston, where she met with Franklin B. Sanborn, a well-known abolitionist who was a supporter and confidant of Brown and a member of Brown’s Secret Six. Sanborn would become one of Tubman’s most staunch and reliable supporters, writing the first, and, as recent biographer Catherine Clinton notes, perhaps the most accurate biography of Tubman’s early life.

Incapacitated by illness in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1859, Tubman was unable to join Brown in the attack at Harpers Ferry. Brown commenced his attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry with a small group of twenty-one men on Sunday night, October 16, 1859. Two of those men were from Tubman’s community in St. Catherine, Canada. By Tuesday, Robert E. Lee and a party of U.S. Marines had forced them to retreat, and the raid was suppressed. Sanborn, Douglass, and other abolitionists fled to Canada in fear of being arrested and carried off to Virginia for trial. Tubman was devastated by the loss of Brown, whom she admired for his valiant battle against the Slave Power. Among many moments of conflict, Brown’s assault on Harper’s Ferry made him a martyr and added to the clash that soon initiated South Carolinian secession and the U.S. Civil War.

At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, with the support of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew and Secretary of State William Seward (who sold Tubman a house and land in Auburn, New York in 1859), Tubman became a part of the war effort as a nurse in Monroe and Port Royal, South Carolina. There, she supported communities of formerly enslaved Black people that flocked to Union lines, becoming “contraband” under U.S. military laws.

Although laced with controversy (Abraham Lincoln did not believe Black soldiers would be brave enough to fight), the Militia Act of 1862 initiated the recruitment of Black soldiers by the Union army. Before the official formation of the Massachusetts 54th regiment, the soldiers and military personnel were banded into informal auxiliaries and regiments. These bands were organized by the Bureau of Colored Troops in the spring of 1863 after the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation.

With the arrival of Union colonels Thomas Wentworth Higginson (in the fall of 1862) and James Montgomery (in the spring of 1863) to the Department of the South , Tubman had influential advocates among the Union army and began work as a military scout and spy by early 1863. In addition to Higginson and Montgomery being in charge of Black regiments, they were also abolitionists allied with John Brown in the Harper’s Ferry Raid and Kansas actions, respectively. Extremely clandestine and sensitive, Tubman’s espionage operation was under the direction of the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton.

Under the leadership of Colonel James Montgomery and Tubman, a band of 150 Black soldiers from the 2nd Regiment Volunteer South Carolina Infantry (African Descent) executed the famed Combahee River Raid in June 1863. In addition to securing the support of enslaved communities, Tubman’s plans provided the location of Rebel torpedoes, guiding the Union gunboats to avoid them.

But by the time Confederate headquarters became abreast of the incursion, more than 750 enslaved Black people had self-emancipated onto Union gunboats with the help of Tubman and 150 Black soldiers. With the success of Tubman’s plan, the estates of the Heywards, the Middletons, the Lowndes, and other Carolina dynasties were left ruined and disgraced.

In addition to a Union win, the Combahee River Raid demonstrated the intelligence, organization, and bravery of Black soldiers. This set the stage for the incoming Massachusetts 54th Regiment. The military action also initiated an aggressive strategy directed at the Slave Power economy. The Combahee River Raid served as a strategic precedent to Sherman’s March of 1864 and military plans targeting Southern plantation economies.

Having returned to Boston from Canada before the beginning of the Civil War, in 1863, Franklin Sanborn became the editor of the antislavery journal, Commonwealth. Just a month after the raid, on July 11th, 1863, he published “Harriet Tubman,” a biography of Tubman as a conductor of the UGRR and her recent contribution as a military organizer of the Combahee River Raid.

Although Black soldiers and military personnel were a central part of Union success, inequality in pay and resources persisted. Specifically, at the intersection of race and gender, the U.S. government was not paying Tubman for her work as a nurse, scout, spy, and organizer of newly freed communities. She raised funds to sustain herself and support freed communities by creating small enterprises—baking pies, making savory elixirs like root beer, and taking in laundry for soldiers and other military personnel. In an effort to fundraise for her, Ednah Dow Cheney, a writer, abolitionist, and friend of Tubman’s, authored a biographical account of Tubman’s life in the Freedmen’s Record, the journal of the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, in March 1865.

Scenes from a Life

A few months after the Civil War ended in October 1865, Tubman traveled by train from Philadelphia to New York with a half-fare ticket. The conductor ordered her to the smoking car. When Tubman refused, the conductor and male passengers violently threw her into the smoking car, breaking her arm, shoulder, and ribs. These types of racist abuses occurred often, and Tubman’s experience demonstrates growing postbellum animosity of the social and political placing of Black people in the United States.

Adding insult to physical injury, the United States government ignored and denied Tubman’s requests for military pension as a nurse and Union aide. The government only provided financial assistance by approving the pension of her veteran husband, Nelson Davis. In need of funds to support her aging parents and pay her mortgage for the Seward property in Auburn, Tubman acquired the help of Sarah Bradford to pen her biography as a manuscript; earlier biographies were published as articles.

Bradford published Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman in 1869. In addition to describing Tubman’s narrative, the book details records submitted by Tubman to the U.S. government for Civil War pension claims with testimonies from luminaries, such as Lucretia Mott, Franklin Sanborn, William Seward, Gerrit Smith, Thomas Garrett, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, the Rev. Henry Fowler, and Tubman’s nephew James A. Bowley. Although helpful in supporting the immediate financial need for Tubman and her family, contemporary Tubman biographers argue that Bradford’s compulsion for “accuracy” and “truth” likely muted many aspects of Tubman’s narrative.

The narrative states that Tubman’s parents were enslaved when she rescued them. The book has a reputation for being ill-constructed. In the second edition, Bradford confesses, “the first edition of this story… was written in the greatest possible haste while the writer was preparing a voyage to Europe... There was the pressing need for this book, to save the poor woman’s little home from being sold under mortgage.”

Bradford’s second edition was highly problematic. Published in 1886 during another period of financial hardship for Tubman, Harriet, The Moses of Her People (1886) gives a reconciliatory representation of chattel slavery and the Civil War. The popularity of the Lost Cause narrative grew during this period. Additionally, the increasing power of the Redeemers represents the transition from Reconstruction (ended in 1877 with the Compromise of 1877) to Jim Crow segregation (supported by the federal government with the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).

Much of the vivid details and blunt commentary about slavery from the first edition, such as the “Essay on Woman-Whipping,” were muted in the second. Contemporary biographer Kate Larson notes that for the first time, “Bradford… includes ‘merry little darkies’ on Tubman’s master’s plantation.” Bradford also uses more dialect when quoting Tubman. The 1869 and 1886 editions assemble into an imperfect memoir. While adding to the mythology and misrepresentation of Tubman, the volume reveals thematic caricature reproductions about slavery and the U.S. Civil War in the post-war and post-Reconstruction periods.

The Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People

Harriet Tubman died in 1913. In addition to contributions during the period of slavery and Civil War, Tubman experienced: the election of Black people to public office during radical Reconstruction and the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction; Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and separate but equal state and federal legislation; the publication of the best-selling novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan in 1905 (which is based on the 1915 film the Birth of a Nation); the early waves of the Great Migration of Black people escaping terror in the south. Tubman almost lived to see the 19th Amendment pass Congress in 1920, providing women with the right to vote, but it did not change anything for Black women barred in the Jim Crow South.

Passing away in 1913, Tubman outlived her close colleagues of activists and abolitionists: William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, William Seward, Lucretia Mott, Gerrit Smith, Jermain Loguen, Lewis Hayden, Martha Coffin Wright, Sojourner Truth, Thomas Garrett, Wendell Phillips, and William Still. Before her death, with the help of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Black women club organizations, in 1908, Tubman was able to establish The Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People. The Harriet Tubman Home became the only charity outside New York City dedicated to the shelter and care of African Americans in New York state. The main brick building, John Brown Hall, also known as the John Brown Infirmary, was filled with “comfortable furniture, plenty of clean white linen, enameled beds, and surrounded by bountiful orchards.”

Tubman’s story is slowly being reclaimed, moving away from the post-Reconstruction revisioning of Sarah Bradford’s narrative. But another Tubman biography was not published until 1943. Earl Conrad, a former Teamsters Union organizer in Harlem, supporter of communists and labor radicals, and New York correspondent for the Chicago Defender, began research in 1938. Publishers were not interested until Associated Publishers, a newly founded African American press in Washington, D.C., agreed to publish Conrad’s biography of Tubman. He interviewed family members and close colleagues of Tubman, in lieu of the lack of archival material. Most importantly, Conrad highlighted Tubman’s military career (both with John Brown and the Civil War) and her suffrage activism.

A sign of the times, Tubman’s women's suffrage activities were contested by leaders in the white women-led women’s movement, such as Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association after Susan B AnthonUsing Sanford and Conrad as examples, contemporary biographers have reconsidered Tubman’s narrative and its place in the histories of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

The legacy of Harriet Tubman still permeates. Tubman is a vital figure for radical Black feminism. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980, led by scholar Barbara Smith. The Collective’s work highlighted racism and white supremacy within the white feminist movement and how the movement was not addressing the particular needs of Black women. Harriet’s Apothecary was established in Brooklyn by activists and healers of color as an ode to Tubman’s role as a healer, and the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm was founded by Black queer farmer Dallas Robinson in 2020.

Harriet Tubman’s story vividly moves from bondage to leading an army of formerly enslaved Black people against the Slave Power. As a disabled Black woman who could not read or write—but who could read the stars with the diligence of Galileo Galilei or Kashf al-Ghummah fi Nafa al-Ummah of Timbuktu—the intersectionality at the core of her narrative is central to understanding not only U.S. chattel slavery but also Black liberation, healing, and the importance of ongoing resistance. The radical realities of her story overtly challenge the legitimacy of the notion that any law or state power that kidnaps, detains, tears apart families, and forces them to labor. And these systems must be dismantled by any and all means.

The life and contributions of Harriet Tubman mean that bad laws must be broken and that mutual aid and community care are key. They are a call for defunding and dismantling the U.S. Border Patrol, ICE, and the police. They are a reminder that we owe no respect to and should always challenge national leaders who dehumanize the hyper-marginalized. They are a call for Reparations (period). And no matter how long it takes or how many times it takes, we will win.

The problem that many have with Tubman is her legacy, influence, and impact: her radical abolitionism still lives.

Biographies on General Harriet Tubman*

  • A North-Side View of Slavery (Benjamin Drew, 1855)

  • “Harriet Tubman,” Commonwealth (Franklin B. Sanborn,1863)

  • Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Sarah Bradford, 1868)

  • Harriet, The Moses of Her People (Sarah Bradford, 1886)

  • Harriet Tubman (Earl Conrad, 1943)

  • Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Jean M. Humez, 2004)

  • Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Catherine Clinton, 2004)

  • Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman (Kate Clifford Larson, 2004)

  • Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Milton C. Sernett, 2007)

  • Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom: A Brief History with Documents (Lois E. Horton, 2013)

  • Harriet Tubman: Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights in the Nineteenth Century (Kristen T. Oertel, 2015)

  • She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (Erica Armstrong Dunbar, 2019)

*children/young adult books not included

Lisa V. BettyComment