Harriet Tubman's Legacy Lives On

[deutsey]

From a local column I write:

http://www.midshorelife.com/content/harriet-tubman%E2%80%99s-legacy-lives

On October 3, 1849, 160 years ago this past Saturday, the following notice from Eliza Ann Brodess, from Bucktown in Dorchester County, appeared in a local newspaper called the Cambridge Democrat:



Three Hundred Dollars Reward.

Ran away from the subscriber on Monday the 17th ult., three negroes, named as follows: HARRY, aged about 19 years…he is of a dark chestnut color, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high; BEN, aged about 25 years, is very quick to speak when spoken to, he is of a chestnut color, about six feet high; MINTY, aged about 27 years, is of a chestnut color, fine looking, and about 5 feet high. One hundred dollars reward will be given for each of the above named negroes, if taken out of the State, and $50 each if taken in the State. They must be lodged in Baltimore, Easton or Cambridge Jail, in Maryland.

The “fine looking…5 feet high” Minty the notice refers to was an African American woman originally named Araminta Ross, now more famously known as Harriet Tubman.

Brodess posted the notice after Tubman and two of her brothers made their first attempt to escape race slavery on the Eastern Shore. They didn’t make it to freedom that time, but as Tubman would go on to demonstrate throughout her life, she wasn’t one to let setbacks hold her down.

SNIP

It’s only fitting, then, that Free the Slaves would reward the efforts of anti-slavery groups with the Harriet Tubman Award. Free the Slaves gave this year’s

Tubman Award (which includes a two-year $50,000 grant) to the Shramajivee Mahila Samity (SMS). This women’s association “fights slave marriage and other forms of domestic slavery” in India. (Free the Slaves also offers an award honoring Frederick Douglass, another anti-slavery icon from the Shore).

[Captain Hilts]

1. VERY interesting! $300 was a huge chunk of change then. Keep history alive! nt

[deutsey]

3. It's a mixed bag here on the Shore...

Pride that both Tubman and Douglass are from here, shame that they both had to escape from here.

I'm reading a good book on the civil rights movement in Cambridge, MD (Civil War on Race Street, by Peter B. Levy). Part of my family is from there and I lived there between '75 and the early '80s, but I had no idea about how Cambridge was one of the major civil rights hotspots back in the '60s. I had a vague sense of things that had happened, but was not aware of the freedom rides to Cambridge in the early '60s, George Wallace coming to speak there, H. Rap Brown igniting a riot in '67...There was also a big strike in the late '30s that threatened to bring working-class blacks and whites together until it was crushed.

Interesting that so much of that history was brushed under the rug when I was growing up.

[lunatica]

2. Harriet Tubman is one of the people I think about when I see apathy

Whenever I see people who are being oppressed who just sit and take it and shrug apathetically and say they can't do anything about it I think of our great American heroes and heroins who refused to take much worse. When I think of them I always find a way of resisting. It's cost me more than one job, but I don't regret it.