Black History Fact of the Week: Harriet Tubman
Grandma Moses
On April 20, 1853, fearless leader, Harriet Tubman, began her work on the Underground Railroad.
She took her sister and her sister’s two children to Maryland on her first trip to freedom. A year later, she rescued her brother and then her aged parents. Over the period of ten years, Tubman made an estimated 19 trips into and out of the South, freeing at least 300 enslaved Africans.
Known for her intense and powerful personality, Tubman was a crafty leader. Despite her face being plastered all over the South on wanted posters asking for her return for a $40,000 reward, she continued to free the oppressed, even in the face of tremendous danger.
She carried chickens on a wire when she walked the paths Whites frequented. If a White person came close, she would pull the wire tight to excite them. The chickens would flap their wings wildly, blocking the view of her face.
On the Underground Railroad, she also carried a shotgun, but not for protection; it was used to shoot those who dared to turn back.
Tubman devised several ingenious techniques to protect those she freed, including keeping drugs for babies to keep them quiet, timing escapes, and putting on acts. In one incident, she noticed two men reading a poster with her picture. They mentioned she was illiterate. So she quickly grabbed a book and pretended to read it.
Moses, as she was later called, conducted the Underground Railroad until 1860. She also worked closely with abolitionists as a Union cook, nurse and spy. After the Civil War, she settled in Auburn, N.Y., and died in 1913.
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With all this talk about slavery and “Django: Unchained” we bring into focus writer Alex Haley, the man who dared to write a groundbreaking novel about his ancestors entitled “Roots.”
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President Barack Obama views the Emancipation Proclamation with a small group of African American seniors, their grandchildren and some children from the Washington, D.C. area, in the Oval Office. Jan.
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