Harriet Tubman Can’t Be Erased
Go down, Moses.
The National Park Service has removed Harriet Tubman from the Underground Railroad. According to the Washington Post, Tubman’s photograph is now missing from the park’s webpage. In its place are “images of Postal Service stamps that highlight ‘Black/White cooperation’ in the secret network.” Tubman is relegated to just one of many abolitionists of all races.
The park’s webpage now describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement,” an effort that “bridged the divides of race.” There’s no longer any mention of slavery itself.
Last month, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Smithsonian to remove any “divisive narratives” or what we might call “the truth.” Tubman is a likely target for Trump’s perversion of history. She was a brave woman who foiled powerful, evil men.
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Like every human, she was born free until someone willingly chose to enslave her. Even as a child, she endured vicious beatings by white men who sought to break her spirit. Her enslaver, Edward Brodess, did not permit Tubman’s family to remain together, and he “hired” her out at the age of six to provide childcare for the overseers’ lousy kids.
Once, when she was 13, she witnessed an enslaved person attempting to escape. She denied the overseer any “Black/white cooperation” in preventing the escape, and when the overseer hurled a heavy metal weight at the person fleeing, he struck Tubman instead, fracturing her skull. She came close to death but was still sent back into the fields almost immediately. “There I worked with the blood and sweat rolling down my face til I couldn’t see,” she said.
She never fully recovered from her injury, experiencing chronic pain and dizziness throughout her life. She also suffered from what she called “sleeping spells” but what we’d diagnose today as narcolepsy. She started to have visions and vivid dreams that she believed were premonitions from God. This inspired her to seek liberation for herself and others who were enslaved. That’s probably an example of what the National Park Service now considers “Black/White cooperation.”
When she married John Tubman in 1844, she changed her first name to Harriet (perhaps in honor of her mother). By 1849, Brodess was in debt and started selling his human property. Fearing what this would mean for her and her brothers Harry and Ben, she planned her first escape attempt in October 1849. Brodess’s widow, Eliza, placed a “runaway slave” ad in the paper that refers to Harriet by an early nickname, “Minty.”
Harry and Ben returned to the plantation when they learned about the ad, but Harriet would later escape on alone. “I’ll meet you in the morning,” she told a friend through song, “I’m bound for the promised land.”
She followed the stars from Maryland to Pennsylvania. Once she’d reached freedom, she made connections with local abolitionists, including William Still, a free Black man based in Philadelphia. He was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, which was the term for safe houses where abolitionists provided refuge for freedom seekers. The “station masters” hosted the refugees within churches and their own homes.
Still is an impressive figure in his own right. He was chairman of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society’s Vigilance Committee. He kept careful records of the people who traveled the Underground Railroad, which helped reunite them with their families. He assisted at least 649 people to freedom.
Tubman soon became a “conductor” on the railroad. In 1851, she returned for her husband and discovered he’d remarried after believing she was dead. She still offered to take the couple to freedom, but John refused.
The National Park Service’s webpage on the Underground Railroad no longer mentions 1850’s Fugitive Slave Act, a glaring omission that minimizes the scope of Tubman’s heroism. The Fugitive Slave Act “stipulated that it was illegal for any citizen to assist an escaped slave and demanded that if an escaped slave was sighted, he or she should be apprehended and turned in to the authorities for deportation back to the ‘rightful’ owner down south. Any United States Marshall who refused to return a runaway slave would pay a hefty penalty of $1,000.”
The northern “free states” were now significantly less free for Black people. Those fleeing slavery now ventured as far as Canada rather than the northern United States, and Tubman conducted 11 trips from Maryland to St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada between 1850 and 1860. Black people — both enslaved and free — called her “Moses” for her successful missions venturing into enemy territory and freeing the enslaved.
Tubman never learned to read, but she learned how to walk silently through the pitch black woods. She learned how to forage for food and distinguish between edible and poisonous plants. She learned which herbs and plants could be used to treat wounds. She learned how to read people and their movements without their noticing, as her life depended on it.
She was an infamous figure at the time, and there were bounties on her head of up to $40,000 (or about $1.6 million today). They never caught her, though, and between 1850 to 1860, she’d personally delivered 70 people (including her own parents) to freedom.
“I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger,” Tubman said.
Yes, some white abolitionists supported Tubman along the railroad, but the “Black/white cooperation” wasn’t massive. When Tubman spoke about her work at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Boston in 1860, a Chicago Press and Tribune reporter described her a “hard looking old colored woman” who took “away from the house of bondage some forty chattels personal and that in the most felonious manner.”
Tubman was unable to rescue her sister before she died, and “Black/white cooperation” was insufficient to raise the bribe money necessary to free her sister’s children, Ben and Angerine, who remained enslaved.
During the Civil War, Tubman served as a soldier and spy for the Union Army. In June 1863, she guided 150 black soldiers under Colonel James Montgomery’s command past mines on the Combahee River to assault several South Carolina plantations, where she helped liberate more than 700 enslaved people.
She continued fighting after the war, becoming an advocate for women’s suffrage. “I suffered enough to believe [I have the right to vote],” she said. She died in 1913 but her legacy endures despite any executive order.
Harriet Tubman is a true American hero, a concept that confounds people like Donald Trump regardless of her race and sex. Tubman isn’t as easily sanitized as Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr. The persistent myth is that Dr. King’s eloquent words alone stirred the consciences of good white people, who then passed civil rights legislation. It’s as simple as that, for the simple minded at least. Dr. King promoted non-violence resistance, which a nation that has spilled blood in every corner of the globe can selectively praise.
Tubman is far more radical. She broke the law and repeatedly outwitted white people. She carried a revolver and was prepared to use it against slave catchers and their dogs. She was also willing to shoot anyone who tried to turn back along the way, as that could compromise the safety of everyone else. She recalled how one man grew weary on the arduous path and announced he’d return to the plantation. She pointed a gun at his head and said, “Go on or die.” He did.
“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to — liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”
As if our country has honored enough Black heroes and now we want to try and erase the ones we actually know about. It’s no wonder that Black people don’t feel seen.
Make no mistake, tRump did not like the extreme popularity of the Black woman running against him. He’s a small pitiful excuse of a human as are all his racist misogynistic sycophants who are happy to carry out this erasure.
We can't get that abomination in the White House outta there fast enough. Does he really think he can erase history? Are books that tell of these brave men and women of color going to be ordered to be burned with another of his ridiculous EOs? And once he's gone, think of all the work it will probably take to reinstate everything that has been scrubbed. This timeline is a nightmare.