Harriet Tubman showed how to act bravely in dark times

Harriet Tubman. There are few more iconic women in the history of the United States. A woman who not only freed herself from slavery, but who returned again, and again, and again to dangerous lands to help free others. 

So many others. 

Her resistance is legendary, and she is remembered until today. 

Harriet Tubman was born in March 1822 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Born into slavery. Her grandmother had been stolen from her home in Africa, and sailed on a terror slave ship across the Atlantic to be sold. 

Harriet Tubman was born with the name Araminta Ross. She was forced to work as a little girl. She was beaten and whipped, and even suffered a traumatic head injury that would affect her throughout her life. Many brothers and sisters were ripped from her mother’s arms and sold to other families. But she also saw her mother’s resistance when they came for her younger brother. Her mother hid him for a month and promised to fight to keep him from them.

In her early 20s, Araminta Ross married. She changed her name to Harriet Tubman. 

In 1849, the patriarch of the estate that owned her died. The descendants planned to sell her and others. To break apart their remaining family. She would not have it. 

She fled slavery with two brothers on September 17, 1849. Her brothers changed their minds and convinced her to turn back. But she had soon fled again. This time there was no going back. 

She boarded the Underground Railroad, a network of people who helped slaves flee the South. Harriet Tubman traveled by night. She fled from safe house to safe house. Walking north to Pennsylvania, a free state. 

The trip was only 90 miles, but on foot., under the darkness of night, it would have taken days or weeks. And she had to be on the lookout for slave catchers who tracked down fugitive slaves and brought them back for ransom.

Finally, Harriet Tubman crossed into Pennsylvania. 

“When I found I had crossed that line,” she later said, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”

But her freedom was not enough. Her loved ones were still enslaved. “I was free,” she would say. “and they should be free.”

And they would be.

Harriet Tubman saved money working odd jobs in Philadelphia and New Jersey, and in late 1850 she traveled back into Maryland, to Baltimore, where she helped her niece and her family flee to Philadelphia.

The next year, Harriet returned to Maryland again. This time she saved her younger brother Moses and two other men. In December 1851, she returned again, helping 11 people escape. And again, and again, and again, she returned with the help of so many others and brought out dozens on the road to freedom. 

Harriet Tubman was devout, and she found in the Bible inspiration and faith in her struggle to free those who were enslaved.

“I have wrought in the day – you in the night,” abolitionist Frederick Douglass would write of her. “The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.” 

She would make 13 trips back and forth throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. She rescued roughly 70 people from enslavement. They called her Moses, like the prophet who led the Hebrews from Egypt. 

Harriet Tubman would help people flee to Pennsylvania and then to Canada after the Fugitive Slave Act forced law enforcement in the North to help return runaway slaves to the South. But her resistance didn’t stop there. During the Civil War, she worked with the Union army as a cook, a nurse, a scout, and a spy. She helped the North to free hundreds of enslaved people. She was an icon who even later in life would fight for women’s suffrage — the women’s right to vote. 

Harriet Tubman died in March 1913. Her life and legacy continue to inspire. Resistance against all odds. Resistance in the face of so much injustice. Carrying people to freedom along the footpaths of the Underground Railroad. 

September is Underground Railroad Month in Maryland and other U.S. states. This is the month when both Harriet Tubman and the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass freed themselves from slavery. Their stories and their struggles are as important as ever. 

Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. Two things before I go. First, I’m adding links to some more background information on Harriet Tubman. You can find those in the show notes. 

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This is the latest episode of Stories of Resistance, a podcast series produced by The Real News. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review.

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