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PHOTOGRAPH BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/GETTY IMAGES
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By Starlight Williams, Associate Editor
We all think we know the Harriet Tubman story. The “Moses of her people” was born enslaved in Maryland’s Eastern Shore, she escaped to Philadelphia, and returned at least 13 times to lead 70 of her family and friends along the Underground Railroad to freedom.
That’s all I knew—until I took a road trip to honor this year’s 200th anniversary of her birth. Stepping out onto the open fields of Dorchester County, Maryland, it’s hard to imagine what gave young Tubman the courage to escape—alone. It is harder to comprehend the strength it took for her to achieve what others thought impossible, all the while helping heal a world that would rather have seen her broken.
In her nine decades (she died on this day in 1913), Tubman (pictured above in 1878) became the first U.S. woman to lead an armed military raid and was a spy and nurse for the Union during the Civil War. She joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in their quest for women’s voting rights. She was an outdoorswoman, cared for battered women and children, and established the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes, a first-of-its-kind nursing home for African Americans who had nowhere else to go. And eventually, her face will be on the $20 bill.
Read our full story on how historians are still unraveling the secrets of her life.
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