Abolitionist. Diviner. Healer. Nurse. Naturalist. Freedom fighter. Military raid leader. Spy. Scout. Suffragist. Daughter. Sister. Wife. Mother. Aunt. Friend. National Icon. - Janell Hobson for Ms. Magazine
Perched atop a book case in the Wyman Park Building’s Hard Histories Lab is a bust of Harriet Tubman. I spied the likeness of this singular Marylander during a visit to the Eastern Shore’s Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Park this past fall. (I can’t recommend strongly enough that you make the trip, if you can. It is a movingly innovative place for learning more about Tubman, her life and her legacy.)
I carried the bust back to Baltimore, knowing that Tubman’s example is an apt touchstone for our own work. Among the many roles she played across a long lifetime, Tubman was always a guide, showing others the way to freedom, justice and toward a life of purpose. You might know that in fall 2020, the Friends of Wyman Park Dell renamed a spot that once hosted the Lee-Jackson Confederate memorial the Harriet Tubman Grove.
At Hard Histories, our work revolves around confronting myths and then contending with history. New scholarship on Tubman demonstrates exactly how important this approach to the past can be. Once Tubman’s memory was mired in myth and stories told for children. (Remember Hillary Clinton’s gaffe along these lines at the 2008 DNC convention?) Today, new scholarship — much of it rooted in Black feminist studies — permits us to know the fullness of Tubman’s humanity and to discover the shifting chapters of her life. Her journey can even serve a model for our own — no myths required.
Check out the essays and images curated by Ms. Magazine just in time for Tubman200. You’ll find a time line of her life along with explorations of Tubman as astronomer, visionary, and, yes, icon. Readers can see enslavement through the example of Tubman’s labor and consider what debt we owe her, including dollars and cents. There’s even a space for posting your own haiku, one inspired by Harriet Tubman.
Among my favorites when it comes to new thinking about Harriet Tubman is the 2014 article from JHU’s Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson and Ohio State’s Dr. Treva Lindsey “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom.” Johnson and Lindsey challenge us to think through and then beyond the archive to reclaim histories of Black women’s erotic selves. For young readers, I have gifted more than one copy of Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (Simon & Schuster 2019).
On my list of “must-sees” in this Tubman200 year is artist Wesley Wofford’s statue “The Journey to Freedom,” presently on display at Philadelphia’s City Hall, and the newly discovered photographic portrait of a younger Harriet Tubman, now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Dr. Janell Hobson helps us understand how Tubman continues to guide us, even in 2022, when she writes: “Let us hope that, when Harriet Tubman is finally on our $20, we will have built a nation truly based in freedom, a freedom she never took for granted but forced the issue through self-emancipation and the emancipation of others.”
MSJ.