Where’s My Harriet Tubman $20 Bill?
Racist misogyny is so last century
I didn’t know much about Harriet Tubman until I listened to an audio version of The Water Dancer, a fantastic book by Ta-Nehisi Coates which I reviewed here. In that story she’s portrayed as a supernatural figure who has magical abilities to bring people out of slavery in the South, aka The Coffin, to freedom in the North.
In fact, she was such a good conductor on the Underground Railroad that she was called Moses. She made 13 extremely dangerous rescue missions on her own and guided 70 people out, never losing a passenger. She also acted as a scout and a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and led the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 slaves. She was the first (and only?) woman to lead an armed raid in that war. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, allowing capture and kidnap of former slaves in free territory, she led groups farther north to safety in Canada.
I want this heroic woman on my money.
Born a slave, Harriet was whipped and beaten as a child, separated from her mother and father for long periods when she was “hired out” to work on other plantations, saw several siblings disappear when they were sold, and suffered a serious head injury as a teenager when a slave owner threw a…
