Harriet Tubman
In ZORA. More on Medium.
We can’t settle for symbolism. We gotta do more to meet the needs of our community.
On Monday, we learned that President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department plans to expedite the process of redesigning the $20 bill to feature an image of Harriet Tubman. While the idea to replace Andrew Jackson as the face was raised more than four years ago, and opposed by Donald Trump, the Biden administration wants the new $20 bills to happen stat.
“The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday. …
Like Harriet Tubman, they too helped others to get free
“Where are you from?” This is the question I am asked most frequently, beginning in my college years. Going to school in New York presented my first real opportunity to forge an identity, which I had no choice but to navigate. I often answered, “I’m Black American.” But my response wasn’t enough for a lot of people. As if being a person of color isn’t enough. I needed to provide them with more. Later in life, I would learn how to articulate my heritage as a fifth-generation American—descending from people who were conductors of the Underground Railroad, American Indians, as…
I traversed her journey to freedom in order to make sense of both the past and present
In the summer of 2017 I found myself in the Bucktown Village Store in Maryland, the same store where Harriet Tubman almost died. The history goes that when asked to help restrain an enslaved man resisting his overseer, Tubman refused. The overseer then threw a two-pound metal weight at the man, but struck Tubman instead. The force of that blow cracked her skull, placing her in a feverish coma for weeks. Both her mother and master were unsure if she’d live.
Yet according to Tubman, that injury gifted her with powerful visions that helped her on her numerous journeys along…
