Maryland

FIRST BLACK WOMAN GENERAL USA

Harriet Tubman awarded posthumous rank of general on Veterans Day


Tubman helped free several Black people from slavery and led soldiers on a gunboat raid during US civil war


Associated Press

Mon 11 Nov 2024 

The revered abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was the first woman to oversee an American military action during a time of war, was posthumously awarded the rank of general on Monday.

Dozens gathered on Veterans Day at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad state park in Maryland’s Dorcester county for a formal ceremony making Tubman a one-star brigadier general in the state’s national guard.

View image in fullscreenHarriet Tubman in a photograph dating from 1860-75, provided by the Library of Congress. Photograph: Harvey B Lindsley/AP

Wes Moore, the governor, called the occasion not just a great day for Tubman’s home state but for all of the US.

“Today, we celebrate a soldier and a person who earned the title of veteran,” Moore said. “Today we celebrate one of the greatest authors of the American story.”

Tubman escaped slavery herself in 1849 and settled in Philadelphia. Intent on helping others achieve freedom, she established the Underground Railroad network and led other enslaved Black women and men to freedom. She then channeled those experiences as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union amy during the civil war, helping guide 150 Black soldiers on a gunboat raid in South Carolina.

Nobody would have judged Tubman had she chosen to remain in Philadelphia and coordinate abolitionist efforts from there, Moore said.

“She knew that in order to do the work, that meant that she had to go into the lion’s den,” Moore siad. “She knew that leadership means you have to be willing to do what you are asking others to do.”

The reading of the official order was followed by a symbolic pinning ceremony with Tubman’s great-great-great-grandniece, Tina Wyatt.

Wyatt hailed her aunt’s legacy of tenacity, generosity and faith, and agreed Veterans Day applied to her as much as any other service member.

“Aunt Harriet was one of those veterans informally, she gave up any rights that she had obtained for herself to be able to fight for others,” Wyatt said. “She is a selfless person.”

Tubman’s status as an icon of history has only been further elevated within the last few years. The city of Philadelphia chose a Black artist to make a 14-ft (4.3m) bronze statue to go on display next year. In 2022, a Chicago elementary school was renamed for Tubman, replacing the previous namesake, who had racist views. However, plans to put Tubman on the $20 bill have continued to stall.

Tvo.orgwww.tvo.org/article/why-harriet-tubman-made-st-catharines-her-home

Why Harriet Tubman made St. Catharines her home | TVO Today

Feb 14, 2019 ... While some moved on to other parts of Canada West, many of those Tubman aided, including members of her family, remained in St. Catharines. They ...

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Harriet Tubman (Salem Chapel, St. Catharines, Ontario)

Half bust portrait of Harriet Tubman situated in a meditation garden next to British Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada-Salem Chapel, St. Catharines, Ontario.

Thecanadianencyclopedia.cawww.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/harriet-tubman

Harriet Tubman | The Canadian Encyclopedia

Feb 5, 2014 ... According to the act, all refugee slaves in free Northern states could be returned to enslavement in the South once captured. Tubman therefore ...

WAITING FOR HER $20 BILL

Harriet Tubman led military raids during the Civil War as well as her better-known slave rescues

The Conversation
April 28, 2022

Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem, New York 

stockelements / Shutterstock.com

Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.

What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America.

“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once 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.”

Though Tubman is most famous for her successes along the Underground Railroad, her activities as a Civil War spy are less well known.

As a biographer of Tubman, I think this is a shame. Her devotion to America and its promise of freedom endured despite suffering decades of enslavement and second class citizenship.

It is only in modern times that her life is receiving the renown it deserves, most notably her likeness appearing on a US$20 bill in 2030. The Harriet Tubman $20 bill will replace the current one featuring a portrait of U.S. President Andrew Jackson.
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In another recognition, Tubman was accepted in June 2021 to the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. She is one of 278 members, 17 of whom are women, honored for their special operations leadership and intelligence work.

Though traditional accolades escaped Tubman for most of her life, she did achieve an honor usually reserved for white officers on the Civil War battlefield.


After she led a successful raid of a Confederate outpost in South Carolina that saw 750 Black people rescued from slavery, a white commanding officer fetched a pitcher of water for Tubman as she remained seated at a table.
A different education

Believed to have been born in March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Rit and Ben Ross.


“Minty” was the fifth of nine Ross children. She was frequently separated from her family by her white enslaver, Edward Brodess, who started leasing her to white neighbors when she was just 6 years old.

At their hands, she endured physical abuse, harsh labor, poor nutrition and intense loneliness.

As I learned during my research into Tubman’s life, her education did not happen in a traditional classroom, but instead was crafted from the dirt. She learned to read the natural world – forests and fields, rivers and marshes, the clouds and stars.


She learned to walk silently across fields and through the woods at night with no lights to guide her. She foraged for food and learned a botanist’s and chemist’s knowledge of edible and poisonous plants – and those most useful for ingredients in medical treatments.

She could not swim, and that forced her to learn the ways of rivers and streams – their depths, currents and traps.

She studied people, learned their habits, watched their movements – all without being noticed. Most important, she also figured out how to distinguish character. Her survival depended on her ability to remember every detail.


After a brain injury left her with recurring seizures, she was still able to work at jobs often reserved for men. She toiled on the shipping docks and learned the secret communication and transportation networks of Black mariners.

Known as Black Jacks, these men traveled throughout the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic seaboard. With them, she studied the night sky and the placement and movement of the constellations.

She used all those skills to navigate on the water and land.

“… and I prayed to God,” she told one friend, “to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”

Tubman was clear on her mission. “I should fight for my liberty,” she told an admirer, “as long as my strength lasted.”

The Moses of the Underground Railroad

In the fall of 1849, when she was about to be sold away from her family and free husband John Tubman, she fled Maryland to freedom in Philadelphia.

Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 13 times and successfully rescued nearly 70 friends and family members, all of whom were enslaved. It was an extraordinary feat given the perils of the 1850 Slave Fugitive Act, which enabled anyone to capture and return any Black man or woman, regardless of legal status, to slavery.

Those leadership qualities and survival skills earned her the nickname “Moses” because of her work on the Underground Railroad, the interracial network of abolitionists who enabled Black people to escape from slavery in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.


Harriet Tubman, far left, poses with her family, friends and neighbors near her barn in Auburn, N.Y., in the mid- to late 1880s. Bettmann/Getty Images

As a result, she attracted influential abolitionists and politicians who were struck by her courage and resolve – men like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony, one of the world’s leading activists for women’s equal rights, also knew of Tubman, as did abolitionist Lucretia Mott and women’s rights activist Amy Post.

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” Tubman once said. “and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Battlefield soldier

When the Civil War started in the spring of 1861, Tubman put aside her fight against slavery to conduct combat as a soldier and spy for the United States Army. She offered her services to a powerful politician.

Known for his campaign to form the all-Black 54th and 55th regiments, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew admired Tubman and thought she would be a great intelligence asset for the Union forces.

He arranged for her to go to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work with Army officers in charge of the recently captured Hilton Head District.

There, she provided nursing care to soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated people who crowded Union camps. Tubman’s skill curing soldiers stricken by a variety of diseases became legendary.

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But it was her military service of spying and scouting behind Confederate lines that earned her the highest praise.

She recruited eight men and together they skillfully infiltrated enemy territory. Tubman made contact with local enslaved people who secretly shared their knowledge of Confederate movements and plans.

Wary of white Union soldiers, many local African Americans trusted and respected Tubman.

According to George Garrison, a second lieutenant with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, Tubman secured “more intelligence from them than anybody else.”

In early June 1863, she became the first woman in U.S. history to command an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers Regiment along the Combahee River.


The ruins of a slave cabin still remain in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman led a raid of Union troops during the Civil War that freed 700 enslaved people.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

While there, they routed Confederate outposts, destroyed stores of cotton, food and weapons – and liberated over 750 enslaved people.

The Union victory was widely celebrated. Newspapers from Boston to Wisconsin reported on the river assault by Montgomery and his Black regiment, noting Tubman’s important role as the “Black she Moses … who led the raid, and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.”

Ten days after the successful attack, radical abolitionist and soldier Francis Jackson Merriam witnessed Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Hilton Head district, “go and fetch a pitcher of water and stand waiting with it in his hand while a black woman drank, as if he had been one of his own servants.”

In that letter to Gov. Andrew, Merriam added, “that woman was Harriet Tubman.”
Lifelong struggle

Despite earning commendations as a valuable scout and soldier, Tubman still faced the racism and sexism of America after the Civil War.


Harriet Tubman is seen in this 1890 portrait.

MPI/Getty Images

When she sought payment for her service as a spy, the U.S. Congress denied her claim. It paid the eight Black male scouts, but not her.

Unlike the Union officers who knew her, the congressmen did not believe – they could not imagine – that she had served her country like the men under her command, because she was a woman.

Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote that he bore “witness to the value of her services… She was employed in the Hospitals and as a spy [and] made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines displaying remarkable courage, zeal and fidelity.”

Thirty years later, in 1899, Congress awarded her a pension for her service as a Civil War nurse, but not as a soldier spy.

When she died from pneumonia on March 10, 1913, she was believed to have been 91 years old and had been fighting for gender equality and the right to vote as a free Black woman for more than 50 years after her work during the Civil War.

Surrounded by friends and family, the deeply religious Tubman showed one last sign of leadership, telling them: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Kate Clifford Larson, Visiting Scholar Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Thank god for Canada': Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill is a triumph for the Great White North

© Provided by National Post Portrait of Harriet Tubman taken just after the end of the U.S. Civil War.

The new administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has fast-tracked efforts to feature famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill, a change that was first announced in 2016. Below, an updated version of a post first published in 2016 arguing the Canadian case for why there could be no greater figure on the world’s most circulated banknote.

If Canada could have hoped for anyone on a United States Treasury Note, it would have to be Harriet Tubman.

Here was a woman who lived in Canada, who risked her life to turn people into Canadians and stands as a testament that when it came to basic human freedom, the so-called “land of liberty” couldn’t hold a candle to a cold, agrarian British colony. “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer, I brought ’em all clear off to Canada,” Tubman told her biographer in 1869.

Tubman will be taking the place of seventh president Andrew Jackson, one of four men featured on U.S. money who owned slaves — and a president who ironically hated central banking.

“We’re ecstatic that we can call her one of our own,” said Rochelle Bush, historian for Tubman’s former church in St. Catharines, Ont. Between the 1851 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the opening shots of the Civil War 10 years later, Tubman was a well-known attendee at the Salem Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church.

That is, when she wasn’t slipping back over the border to smuggle more people to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In total, Tubman freed roughly 300 former slaves by bringing them to Canadian soil, and hundreds of their descendants remain in the country to this day. Within Tubman’s own family tree, in fact, Bush estimates there are roughly 100 descendants living in Ontario and British Columbia.

As Bush noted, it’s a further testament to Canada that some of these Tubman descendants look black, while others look white. “Thank god for Canada; interracial marriage was accepted,” she said. In several former slave states, meanwhile, interracial marriage would not be legalized until 50 years after Tubman’s death.

Canada’s history is not free of chattel slavery. Notably, James McGill, the founder of McGill University, owned black household slaves. But as a component part of the British Empire, Canada was subject to London’s 1834 effective abolition of the practice , which occurred a full 31 years before slavery was completely abolished in the U.S.

Nevertheless, U.S. history has long been unusually coy about pointing out where the Underground Railroad actually ended. Often, textbooks will merely say that slaves were fleeing “north.” While early passengers on the Underground Railroad were initially able to stop their journey in the free Northern states, that ended in 1850 with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, a notoriously coercive measure that made it a crime for Northerners to shelter escaped slaves, even if they lived in a state where slavery had already been rendered illegal. From that point forward, the Underground Railroad had to be extended beyond U.S. borders into British territory

.

Tubman has already been adopted as a figure important to Canadian history. She was briefly in the running to feature on Canada’s $10 bill, and has been named by Parks Canada as a person of national historic significance. Saint Catharines is also home to the Harriet Tubman Public School, complete with a life-sized bronze statue of Tubman.

Kathleen Powell, manager of the St. Catharines Museum, similarly touted that “someone from St. Catharines” would be on a U.S. banknote (which, incidentally, currently costs CDN$25.40).

The honour will soon make Tubman among the most recognizable visages in the world, up there with Albert Einstein and the ubiquitous portrait of Mao Zedong. United States currency is used well beyond the country’s borders, and greenbacks remain the official or unofficial means of monetary exchange in several Central American countries and unstable corners of Africa. And among this vast array of international transactions, it’s the $20 that changes hands the most.

“There’s more $20 bills than human beings out there,” said Douglas Mudd, director of the Edward C. Rochette Money Museum in Colorado. The choice of Tubman is of sort of a no-brainer, said Mudd. In her 90 years, Tubman ran the gamut of United States history; a former slave, an abolitionist, a Civil War hero and an early suffragist. And, like any archetypal American hero, she always carried a gun. “In one person, she covers a number of different bases,” he said.

And, unlike a lot of the more political choices for U.S. money, support for Tubman is definitively nonpartisan. The conservative National Review, for one, praised the addition of a “gun-toting, Jesus-loving spy” in place of “overheated pompous populist” Andrew Jackson.

Appearing on a U.S. treasury note has a way of thrusting people into immortality. Alexander Hamilton was an influential Secretary of the Treasury, to be sure, but it was likely his face on the $10 bill that kept his legend strong centuries after his death. It was the prospect of taking Hamilton off the money, in fact, that inspired a revival in the Founding Father’s life story, including the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

Canadians, of course, have a bad habit of smugly talking up their country in the presence of Americans, but Bush said it’s entirely fine now to “proclaim it to everybody” that the woman on the $20 bill appreciated Canada’s policy of not forcing those of African heritage to work for free.

Of course, in addition to former slaves, Canada also took in the people who had once owned them.

After the Civil War, in which Tubman served as a valuable Union spy and armed scout, British North America accepted many exiled Southerners from the defeated Confederacy, including Confederate president Jefferson Davis . “Canada was the gateway to freedom,” said Bush, “not only for freedom-seekers (the name for Underground Railroad refugees) but for Confederates as well.”

The Harriet Tubman mural that transcends time

Born enslaved roughly 200 years ago, Harriet Tubman became a legendary abolitionist in the US known for working on the Underground Railroad. Street artist Michael Rosato has immortalized the celebrated figure in art.

Michael Rosato's mural "Reflections on Pine" is centered around Tubman

Tubman Country. It's what inhabitants proudly call a stretch of land on the East Coast of the United States. Washington, DC, is just over two hours away by car, but traveling to visit the area invites a journey back in time.

The peaceful maritime region located in the state of Maryland once played a notorious role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1619, the first slave ship docked here carrying Africans who had been kidnapped in what is now Angola.

It is also here, on this segment of land surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, that Harriet Tubman was born, very likely in mid-March 1822, though no one knows for sure.

Born into slavery, Tubman later escaped north to freedom. She then became an abolitionist and one of the most famous participants in the Underground Railroad, a secret safe house network that helped enslaved African Americans travel north to freedom.

She led at least several dozen enslaved individuals to freedom — all at great risk to her own life. She also fought for women's suffrage and Black rights.

Rosato's murals are gigantic, as seen in this photo showing him hanging the portrait panel of Tubman

Tubman's legacy

Artist Michael Rosato is waiting at the entrance to Cambridge, a town in Maryland of 12,000 people. The artist, in his mid-50s, is known for his giant works of street art that often depict figures of American history.

Today, he is standing in front of his mural "Reflections on Pine" (pictured at the top of this article).

The colorful 11-by-48-foot (3-by-14.5-meter) mural shows Tubman as an old woman with a headwrap and coat, standing in a cornfield. Above her is a military plane while next to her are portrayals of Black artists, scientists and politicians, other heroes of history, all of whom emanate from her portrait. What immediately catches the eye is that the perspective seems shifted: We are not looking at Harriet; she is defining us as the viewer.

Tubman was one of those special individuals whose human spirit was greater than anything else, Rosato says: "And to do that took a lot of courage and a lot of faith and just a lot of fortitude."

The artist says he put Tubman at the center of his painting because she played such an important role for many African Americans. "[She] is the inspiration for many African Americans in the community. You know, 'When she could do it, then I can do it,'" he says.

Rosato in his studio in Cambridge, Maryland

Capturing a vibrant Black community

Tubman's legacy contributed to an active Black civil rights movement in Cambridge.

The streets where the Black community lived were once a lively collection of stores, cafes and schools, but things changed after the riots and confrontations with police that occurred in the 1960s.

The mural recalls the vibrant times of the past. "When you look at that mural, there are a lot of things happening in it. That tells the story of a community," Rosato explains, adding that Tubman was the basis of that community.

Rosato's large-scale works in public spaces have generated discussion and received great acclaim. "I thought in designing this, you have to incorporate things that the community, both sides, white and Black, can identify with."
Reaching out, transcending time

Another mural by Rosato, "Take My Hand," shows Tubman by a river. She appears to be stepping over a wall and out of the painting as she extends her right hand to viewers, open and ready to take someone's hand in hers. A photo of a girl symbolically reaching out to the larger-than-life Tubman went viral on social media in 2019.

Rosato's mural "Take My Hand" shows a young Tubman reaching out to the viewer

At that time, a repressed anger was changing the United States, Rosato says. "The Black community was getting tired of the police shooting[s], they were getting tired of this pent-up acceptance of how they've been treated." All of a sudden, it wasn't just about the painting but also about the young child Tubman touches. For Rosato, this was poetic, and it was moving.

"Young girl, present day, touching the hand of a woman from 200 years ago," Rosato says. "That poetry is, I think, what spoke and what really got people, because [it] allowed them to be that little girl and to be this woman, offering a hand."

Only a few photos of Tubman exist. She is always looking seriously into the camera. This is also the case in the best-known black-and-white picture from 1895, taken when she was 73. While Rosato did use the historical image as a model, he chose to paint the slave emancipator in "Take my hand" at the age of 30. He wanted to show a young, rebellious Harriet and saw it as connected to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The mural not only depicts Tubman, but also shows the landscape where she had lived when she was enslaved — the place where she had to toil as the "property" of a white plantation owner and received whippings as a 6-year-old.

When you look at the mural, you're looking into the past, Rosato says. You can see the vegetation and the water. "And she is transcending time, in a way, because she is offering her hand to us the viewer in the present," he says.

At about 14 feet (4 meters) tall, and with hands measuring 3 feet, Tubman is monumental in size. "It's big — it's imposing, it's not life size, it's larger than life!" Rosato says. "So you are engaging with this larger-than-life woman who is reaching through this wall and part of her foot is painted trompe l'oeil, tricking the eye, to look like it's coming out and into your space."

Rosato's mural centers on African American abolitionist and reformer couple Frederick and Anna Douglass

Amending historic wrongs

Connecting the past and present also has to do with belated efforts to amend historic wrongs and reparations that many governments in the US, from the local to the state to the federal levels, have struggled to make.

Tubman not only helped enslaved people to freedom; she fought in the Civil War against the Southern slave-owning states, scouting out Confederate positions, and she also served as a nurse.

Despite her services, she was denied a pension. It was not until she was in old age, shortly before her death in 1913, that she finally received a monthly pension for her nursing work. She lived to be 91.

This article was originally written in German

Chicago school renamed to honor civil rights activist Tubman

Sat, February 19, 2022

CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago elementary school has unveiled a new sign letting people know it is leaving behind the name of a racist and will instead honor a woman known for helping Black people escape slavery, Harriet Tubman.

The sign comes about a year after a group of parents successfully pushed for the school — long named after Swiss American biologist Louis Agassiz — to change its name to the Harriet Tubman Elementary School.

Officials at Chicago Public Schools are letting other schools in the city change their names after the Chicago Sun-Times reported in late 2020 that 30 of its schools were named after slaveholders and others were named after racists such as Agassiz.

The Board of Education could vote on an updated policy for school name changes next week, the Sun-Times reported.

CPS said in a statement that the new name is “more inclusive and representative” of the district's values.

"The CPS Office of Equity is committed to a comprehensive review process to consider new school names when a school is named after individuals who do not represent the values of our students, families, faculty and support staff,” CPS said.

Agassiz, was a biologist at Harvard in the 1800s and a proponent of scientific racism who sought to prove Blacks were inferior to other races. Two decades ago, a school committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted to strip his name from a school there and rename it for Maria L. Baldwin, who years earlier was the first Black principal of the school.

The Harriet Tubman Elementary School on Chicago's North Side joins a long list of schools around the country to be named after the one-time slave who helped Black people to escape slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad in the 1800s.

TUBMAN $20 HOW'S THAT COMING?!

Harriet Tubman in the $20 Bill : Harriet Tubman

www.harriet-tubman.org/20-dollar-bill

Tubman also served as a spy and scout in the Civil War. On April 2016 the US Treasury announced that a new design of the $20 bill will have the portrait of Harriet Tubman on the front. The image of Andrew Jackson, who had been featured on the bill since 1928, will be removed from the bill because of his policy against Native Americans.

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2021-01-26 · Jan. 25, 2021 President Biden’s Treasury Department is studying ways to speed up the process of adding Harriet Tubman’s portrait to the front of the $20 bill after the Trump

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Cynthia Erivo On the 'Powerful, Powerful' Role Music Played in Her Embodying the Spirit of Harriet Tubman
BY H. ALAN SCOTT ON 12/20/19 

ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER

HARRIET - Official Trailer

Cynthia Erivo, the Tony, Emmy and Grammy-award winning artist, says the Oscar buzz around her most recent performance as Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet is "very overwhelming" and she "genuinely didn't expect it."

Already nominated for two Golden Globes for the role, Erivo breathes life into the often mysterious public image of the famous abolitionist and unofficial leader of the Underground Railroad.

Erivo says she hopes people learn more about the life lived before and after the period for which Harriet (born Araminta Ross, Erivo's Tubman takes her mother's name—Harriet—in the film after running to freedom) was famous. In order to tap into Tubman's soul, Erivo used a skill she knows a thing or two about: singing, a "powerful, powerful" tool to tap into the spirit of Tubman, and ultimately into the film's message of freedom.

"I think we need to use this film to inspire us to do good things and see the strength we have in ourselves," Erivo told Newsweek. "We as people have agency and the ability to bring about really good change."

Why do you think it's important for people to know Harriet Tubman's various names?

Getting to meet Araminta Ross, we get to humanize her and watch her grow. It took time to get from Araminta to Harriet.

What is often left out of Tubman's story is her military service and her work in the women's suffrage movement. Why are these parts of her story so important?

I don't think many people realize she worked in the army and the suffragette movement—much of that in the script we didn't have time to delve into. It's very exciting that a woman, particularly a woman of color, was one of the first women full stop to lead an armed raid and was a general in the army. There's a life story there that continued for a really long time.

Did the music in the film impact your performance?

Yes. It's a connection to the spirits. Negro spirituals were a way to send a message to one another. It's a powerful, powerful thing.

What sort of impact do you hope Tubman's story has on people?

To help or to make change should be a duty of ours. I hope it gives young men and women the courage and the confidence to see a woman who is the center of her narrative and to be strong and fast and mysterious and have this wonderful heart. It's an example that women can do anything.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HARRIET+TUBMAN

Yellen signals support for Harriet Tubman on $20 bill
Agence France-Presse
October 01, 2021

Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem, New York 

Putting Harriet Tubman, a Black woman who escaped slavery and became a leader of the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement, on the $20 bill would be an "honor" but designing banknotes takes time, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday.

Shortly after taking office in January, President Joe Biden's administration announced that it would expedite plans to put Tubman on the bill that is among the most commonly used in the country.

The project, launched by former president Barack Obama but significantly delayed under former president Donald Trump, came back to the forefront after historic demonstrations denouncing racism and police violence against people of color last year.

"I couldn't possibly think of a better way to honor Harriet Tubman's legacy and her courage in fighting for the freedom of the enslaved people and women's right to vote then seeing her on a $20 bill," Yellen said in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee.

However, she warned that "issuing notes is a very lengthy process. It involves collaboration among a number of different agencies and it's necessary to design counterfeit features."

Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 but escaped. She returned multiple times to the slave-owning southern states to help dozens of others flee bondage, either to the northern United States or Canada, both before and during the 1861-1865 Civil War.

During the war she even helped with a raid on Confederate troops, and after the war, she became a champion of women's rights before her death in 1913.

Her life, and in particular her work helping enslaved people escape as a conductor on the "Underground Railroad," were featured in a 2019 Hollywood biopic.

Tubman's image was set to replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the US president behind the "Trail of Tears" that drove dispossessed Native American tribes from the southeast of the expanding country, and who was much admired by Trump.

His Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin announced in 2019 that the revamp of the $20 bill was being put off until 2028, citing "security issues" around counterfeiting.


Yellen appeared alongside Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell days after two regional Fed bank presidents suddenly retired after facing questions over their stock trading activity.

The central bank has faced criticism over the lack of diversity among its top officials, and in response to a question from a lawmaker, Powell promised to consider appointing people of color to replace them.

"I can absolutely guarantee you that we will work hard in both of these processes to find and give a fair shot to diverse candidates for these two jobs; it will be a big focus of both of these processes," Powell said.

Trump’s Info-Scrubbing Threatens the Public’s Right-to-Know Our History

by Bill Berkowitz / April 15th, 2025

Even veteran political observers are unclear about  how far Donald Trump and his Submissives will go to exorcise America’s history, and deny the public’s right-to-know.  The administration has already removed or altered historical and scientific information from federal websites. It also has launched plans to stop collecting significant environment-related data. A recent ProPublica headline reads: “Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters.” The “Trump Administration has removed a number of officials responsible for handling Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) requests,” thus making it more difficult for the public to access government records, read a recent letter from Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform).

Another case in in point: An image of and quote from Harriet Tubman was removed from a National Parks Service webpage about the Underground Railroad. The Washington Post was early in reporting that Tubman’s photograph was disappeared. “In its place,” the Post noted, “are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight ‘Black/White cooperation’ in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.”

CNN reported that “The National Parks Service webpage for the ‘Underground Railroad’ used to lead with a quote from Tubman, the railroad’s most famous ‘conductor,’ a comparison on the Wayback Machine between the webpage on January 21 and March 19 shows. Both the quote and an image of Tubman have since been removed, along with several references to “enslaved” people and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.”

While an outcry caused the restoration of Tubman’s image and quote, its removal was one amongst many Trump-ordered website deletions. Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical Government DEI Programs,” led federal agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security to remove documents and guidance related to diversity, equity, and inclusion from their websites.

Environmental information? Removed! Scientific information? Removed! Health-related information? Removed! Who really knows how much information has already been erased?

Info-cleansing is not a new weapon for Republican presidential administrations. In April 2003, I wrote a piece titled “Operation Info-scrub: Team Bush reviews, rewrites and/or removes information it doesn’t like.” The story detailed ways the George W. Bush administration was tinkering with history, and with the truth. My lede graph read “While Americans are focusing on a looming war with Iraq, increasing threats to privacy, a depressed economy and the permanent war on terrorism, the Bush Administration has been removing information from government Web sites for what appears to be strictly political reasons. Information conflicting with administration policy, the image of government officials, or is just plain objectionable to the president’s conservative constituents has been reviewed and revised or removed altogether.”

A March 2002 memo by President Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card titled “Guidance on Homeland Security Information Issued,” was sent to the heads of all federal departments and agencies. OMB Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog group, reported that the “guidance” suggested that agencies review “its classified, reclassified and declassified information,” and to be aware of a new type of information called “sensitive but unclassified.” The “guidance” stated that “the need o protect such sensitive information from inappropriate disclosure should be carefully considered, on a case-by-case basis,” and that Freedom of Information Act requests should also be considered under these guidelines.

OMB Watch pointed out that a substantial amount of information was removed from the Web sites of a number of agencies including: the Agency for Toxics and Disease Registry, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Internal Revenue Service, National Archives and Records Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Geological Survey. (For examples of what was cleansed, see the OMB’s “Access to Government Information Post September 11th” ).

It is clear that the Trump administration wants to erase the public’s knowledge of the darker parts of our history. It has no interest in the public’s right-to-know. Not only is the administration messing with American history by deleting factual information sources, it is putting up huge barriers preventing journalists from investigating its actions.okTwittRedditEmail

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.

Biden administration will revamp effort to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill

Aarthi Swaminathan
·Reporter
Mon., January 25, 2021

The Biden administration is looking to revamp the effort to place Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, replacing former president Andrew Jackson.

“I was here when we announced that, and it was very exciting and hasn’t moved forward yet,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who also served in the Obama administration, told reporters during a briefing on Monday afternoon. “The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes. It’s important that our notes, our money... reflect the history and diversity of our country and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note will certainly reflect that.”

Psaki added that the administration is trying to find ways to “speed up that effort.”

The Obama administration had first proposed putting the iconic abolitionist on the paper currency in 2016. The goal was for the replacement of Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, to take place in 2020.

Tubman would be the first black woman and the first African American to appear on U.S. currency. Born around 1820, Tubman escaped slavery and later became a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad, where she led enslaved people to freedom before the Civil War.

Obama-era Treasury Secretary Jack Lew first announced the change in 2016 after a viral online campaign to feature a woman on the currency.

In 2020, Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the new $20 bill would not be released until 2030, and the next administration’s secretary would make the decision on the change.—

Aarthi is a writer for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

Officials have voted unanimously to rename 'Dixie' highway after Harriet Tubman

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

© MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Images American abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and led many other slaves to safety using the Underground Railroad.

A highway in Florida won't be keeping its name much longer after a county voted to change the name of a handful of "Dixie" highways to "Harriet Tubman Highway."

Miami-Dade County commissioners unanimously approved plans Wednesday to rename portions of The Dixie Highway, which runs 5,786 miles through 10 states from Michigan to Miami, according to CNN affiliate WPLG.

"The time is always right to do what is right," said Miami-Dade District 9 Commissioner Dennis Moss, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.

Moss led the effort to rename the highway after Tubman, a famous African American abolitionist.

Depending on your perspective, the word Dixie takes on a different meaning for different people. Most commonly, it's associated with the old South and Confederate states. Dixie was considered the land south of the Mason-Dixon line, where slavery was was legal.

Injustice hiding in plain sight

Moss started looking into the name change after reading a letter from a man named Modesto Abety, former CEO of the Children's Trust in Miami-Dade County.

Abety's granddaugther asked him why "Dixie" was still on the name of the roadways considering its association with slavery, Moss told CNN.

"I moved forward with legislation and of course I did it because Dixie is associated with the southern Confederate states," he said.

Moss said the injustice has been hiding in plain sight for years, but he's grateful and proud his colleagues understand the importance of this name change and what the term Dixie has stood for in the past.

The decision to rename Dixie Highway after Tubman came as a suggestion from Abety's granddaughter.

"She was the antithesis of slavery," Moss said. "I thought that suggestion was a good suggestion."

It's important to Moss to set a precedent by not only removing the Dixie name from roadways that Miami-Dade County controls, but to urge the state of Florida to remove it from roadways in which it has jurisdiction.

A stepping stone on the path to change

While the name change was approved by Miami-Dade County commissioners, it's up to each state to act on other parts of the highway. State lawmakers will need to go through their own approval process for the parts each state owns.

The support hasn't been entirely unanimous, but to Moss' surprise, he said there's been little opposition.

It's unclear just how much the renaming process will cost the county, but Moss said he and his colleagues are prepared to do whatever it takes to see that they are changed once and for all.

"If this was an Adolf Hitler Highway, or if this was in our community, a Fidel Castro Highway, [the money] wouldn't even be a consideration as it relates to changing the signs," Moss said. "So let's not allow that to be an impediment and let's do what's right."

White People Meet Up with Fate, Our Best Hope

Kim C. Domenico

March 20, 2026

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In the absence of an authority that arises from the deep roots of being, those who hold power tend to abuse it…. In order to shift the unjust situation in the outer world [there must be ones] who will draw upon a greater source of authority than law or institutions or the market…who will “author”things…

–Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny: the Two Agreements of the Soul

By turning [Harriet] Tubman into a superhero “ with vague “woo-woo powers, we diminish her in memory and reduce our capacity to learn from her life. This…myth obfuscates…who she was on the inside…

–Tiya Miles, Night Flyer

[Tubman’s] choice to accept this altered state of consciousness [following her head injury] as religious experience…she was now distinctly equipped to tackle the questions that haunted her: Why did slavery exist?  And (how) would her people be saved?

–Ibid.

It could be reasonably said of us (white middle-class liberals) that we are people who do not know we’re fated – that is, that we’re biological beings.   We retain our innocent belief in free will against all odds; in fact, we need it for protection against the soul-betraying demands of life in capitalist technocracy.  They say people who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it; most of us who do not know our own true captivity in fate will accept the “nicer”- if not easier –  “fate” given in liberal reality; i.e., the realities of free-market capitalism including its relativization of the very idea that being human means anything beyond a stage toward perfected cyber being.  Arguably, that innocence allows us to sustain our customary way of life under the awful awareness of the evils our government perpetrates in our name here and abroad, most recently adding 180 Iranian school girls murdered by U.S. bombs to the already haunted collective conscience.

As far as “fate” goes, we might be fascinated coming across the words “fate” and “destiny” in a fantasy novel or movie – perhaps intoned by a  Merlin figure –  because those words have resonance which the poetically-attuned ear in the soul hears and is attracted to.  Trained as we are away from serious romanticism, we mostly do not pursue it as having meaning for me.

Not knowing fate in terms of its personal meaning – i.e., my fate –  it is difficult for white liberals to fully appreciate peoples’ lives that have actually used fate to make of them something extraordinary in terms of the good they were able to realize; we tend either to raise them up to superhuman status, or prove them imposters.  Idealistic actions obedient to inwardly accessed authority go against the grain of American materialist aspirations, and against the givens of class; they cannot be evaluated by science-based consciousness.   What is behind the empirical curtain  will never be captured on a cellphone or body camera.  What’s more, we tend to wonder very little about extraordinary virtue in others, unless the results of the action taken are seemingly miraculous (i.e., leading enslaved people to freedom), in which case the doer is known as a “superwoman of the swamps,” or, in the other direction, insidious doubt is sown undermining the doer’s character.

Reading an article about the remarkably admirable life of the late Jesse Jackson (whose fate was to be son of impoverished cotton workers in the south) in CounterPunch, I recalled  the relentless effort by the media in the 1980’s to reduce him to an “ego case.”   And those seeds of doubt work.  They grow.  Like the accusations against MLK for his womanizing.  Or Malcolm X for his hatred of white people, or Black Panthers for their insistence on protecting themselves,  etc.  So that the people who truly are working for social change are so easily translated via the media – which we’re dependent on to know anything of events outside our personal experience–into people suspected of harboring shady, malevolent tendencies toward the rest of us (white people).  That is, secular white liberals, in our way, are as edgy about social revolution as the conservatives, and thus vulnerable to media manipulation. To “think outside the box” of whiteness takes strenuous effort that begins with an acquaintance with personal depth and consciousness of that thing called fate.

+++

Last night, lying awake, I pictured my everlasting personal struggle with self-confidence in a new way.  I had been reading Tiya Miles’s biography of Harriet Tubman, which intentionally pulls Tubman down from the pedestal of supernaturally gifted to someone inwardly attuned to the moral voice in the soul (God).  In so doing, she extends the light of Tubman’s example to those of us suffering not so directly from oppression, but from the dark night of capitalism’s evisceration of meaning, i.e., of the connectedness of all life.  It came to me my social idealism is, similarly,  a “night star” that leads me out from my personal suffering, suffering that is, in truth, a consequence of the oppression of the soul’s imagination in capitalist liberal reality.  My idealism is being in my “right mind,” I am “okay as I am” – not, perhaps–a Jesse Jackson or a Medea Benjamin–but I can be certain that serenity of mind is the only acceptable foundation for virtuous action.  The feeling of relief the “right mind” gives must be from God, I conclude; it cannot come to me without my experiencing personal inclusion in a larger reality.  It obligates me to a larger good – God’s Good – that includes even white people like me with our weird kind of anti-suffering suffering –  in its deliverance.  Though attunement to the night star may be a bigger challenge for liberals raised without deep religious influence, it is still possible–but  first must come the revelation of fate that opens upon religion’s mythic, imaginative depths.

+++

Sam, 78 years old,  was a nearly daily customer at our coffeeshop over its 22 years.  He’s a white (Italian-American) single, amiable guy who loves cars, motorcycles, books, music, and movies, is a reliable volunteer for arts programs, and, for several years, provided faithful assistance to a wheelchair-bound woman prominent in local art circles, until her death.  He made something like 11 trips to New Orleans to help with post-Katrina clean-up, and is a particularly vocal anti-racist.   In fact, he is excited about the topic almost as if he had discovered it. One could, understandably, hear him as one who “protesteth too much” except that he’s obviously sincere.  A few years ago, he was made an honorary member of the local NAACP.

Last month, Sam was arrested on charges of having child pornography on his computer.

As I see his predicament, and I may be the only one who sees it this way, he is now a person who has run into his fate.  I’d almost call it lucky, except that I know it does not/cannot feel that way to him and must sound hard-hearted coming from me.

This happens rarely to white liberals, that one learns that dark thing one never could look at fully consciously – uh-oh, I’m fated to (following Freud), “murder my father and sleep with my mother.” We carry that protective barrier around us that is a rationalist liberal reality.  The dark secret, which is very connected with one’s fate and one’s destiny,  is revealed at last.  But will you accept this dark, unwanted part?  Can you accept the dark part of your nature–in Sam’s case, his sexual interest in children, that will not be tolerated in society, in our lifetimes, if – and learn to live with it with dignity?

Here’s a question connected to the political: Is it possible for people who cannot achieve such humility individually to be trusted on the collective, national scale?  What’s it worth if we ask indigenous Americans and descendants of enslaved people for forgiveness, if I cannot face and forgive that darkness in myself, but can only continue to be and do good so that I will be seen as good, and not as the bad I secretly believe myself to be?  How, that is, do we find our secret goodness, our “right mind,” the strength and authority coming from those deep roots of being?

I believe Sam is not a special case, except in that he committed an actual crime which is how his dark secret is being outed.  Of the two ways to find out why one feels misfitted, that is, to launch oneself on that inward quest, he’s been given the way via “catastrophe” (the other being art).  The very fact that one does not want to go there into the personal darkness is the biggest giveaway. For no matter how many small clues one unconsciously drops that others might pick up on, as Sam did in abundance! (i.e., his compulsive loquaciousness, that easily got on friends’ nerves, no girlfriend or boyfriend but much mention of his – always age and hetero-appropriate – attractions, his strenuous and impressive do-gooding for others) people will not guess – they will  not even be curious – as to what lies behind these behaviors that were  – upon reflection  – noticeably off.

Under the circumstances, social relatedness is in fact connected by mutual consent to capitalism; capitalism our real matrix, both social glue and that which provides us with our shaky sense of individuality in terms of being better than the other.  Most of the time, despite Freud, we take the shallow basis as all there is.  It gets us by in the liberal reality that rewards us with the privilege of whiteness, it readies us for AI’s total undermining of there being any worth (or reason!) in defending “ human being” as I do.

If there is to be repudiation of social connection via the medium of capitalism, if the local community is to be healthily inclusive, then, besides the obvious turning off the screens, it seems pretty obvious in-person living must have a different basis than the given.   I’m arguing that such a basis is possible to find for people who will open the sealed package of their fate,  entering their own wilderness.  At the point one knows one’s fatedness, the harsh law of necessity, other knowledge becomes possible, not before.

+++

Over the course of the almost two full years since the sale and loss to us of our little urban coffeeshop,  I’m beginning to see that the 22 years of “bliss,” the confidence its very existence gave to me, was, in terms of my own soul’s journey,  Circe’s island.  A lovely stopping place, enchanted for sure, but also an interruption in the journey home.   Most crucially, I need to understand my default habit of self-condemnation (differentiated from the more useful self-doubt)  that reappeared with the loss of our Cafe’s protective “umbrella” as what it is – evidence that I’m temporarily out of my right mind! I must now affirm over and over that my “right mind” is the only mind I’m called to be in.  For better and worse, I’m not one of William James’s healthy-minded ones, who automatically turn their faces to the sunny side of the street.  My vulnerability, the fate I was born into, once made conscious, the real trauma suffered in childhood doesn’t disappear,  mine as real for me as Harriet Tubman’s trauma as an enslaved child was for her,  as real as Jesse Jackson’s childhood of poverty and racism was for him.

The cause of my powerful tendency to self-condemnation (one of a host of self-disabling afflictions that plague people in that peculiar white liberal way of “not suffering,”) is traceable to the awful discardability of biological, fated humanity under capitalism. For, whether one knows it consciously or not, capitalism and all who profit from its necessary excess grant to one’s personal life as little worth as that of a Gazan child to the IDF.   People’s Classroom history teacher Luigi is right– it’s not just “your bad day” (and one might add, it’s not because of illegal immigrants taking your jobs and soaking up welfare) – it’s capitalism;  its devaluation of humanness makes me especially vulnerable to the endemic loneliness of our way of life.

Any truly unbearable system can be bearable for most people who suffer in it – even slavery. That is, its indignities and oppressions can be borne as just “the way it is” until something happens to break through.  To discern systemic evil in one’s own case, based upon one’s own experience of traumatic injustice, is a powerful realization.  And indeed,  consciousness of capitalism as evil,  for us who live within its placating context of material abundance and the uber lifeaccessed by social media’s algorithms,  is elusive in a way that the enslaved person’s awareness of slavery as evil may not have been (though Tubman’s philosophical question why does slavery exist suggests its status as evil was not self-evident even to her).  Luigi tells us he “converted” a fellow teacher at his high school, from being a MAGA guy to being on board with socialism (that is, he encouraged him to think!).  But conversions can be shaky – this guy tells him he used to be much happier, now he’s depressed all the time!

The difference comes when one individually realizes the sense of purpose of, say, a Harriet Tubman, living in the context of a slave system, or a Jesse Jackson, that is, when one has met one’s genuine, serious-as-hell fate.  The choice to understand the sense of purpose as God’s, rooted in myth and archetype, as “Night star” guidance, charges it differently; the real commonality for biological beings is suffering.  One can then act,  in the absence of social corroboration, on behalf of the common Good (which includes the good for earth and non-human life).   How do I know I am called to creativity, and to think originally,  just as Tubman knew she was meant to be free when no one, and no church at that time, could tell her that? In the subjectivity of the judgment is its power.  Truth to tell, Sam is unlikely to give up trying to fight against knowing his fate, though it has hit him in the face.  Even so,  the personal question is the first that must be answered; socialist critique then will fit, resting for its truth on the authority of the imaginative, innately anarchist human soul, before even Marx.

Kim C. Domenico, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space),  and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side.  Seminary trained and ordained,  but independently religious. She can be reached at: kodomenico@verizon.net.