On Wednesday April 20, 2016, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that Harriet Tubman would be replacing President
Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill.
Here are nine things you
should know about the legendary civil rights leader.
1. Harriet Tubman didn’t become “Harriet Tubman”
until her mid-20s. She was originally born a slave named Araminta Ross on a plantation in
Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The surname Tubman comes from her first husband, John
Tubman, a free black man, and after marrying, she adopted the name “Harriet”
after her mother: Harriet Ross.
2. A few years after she married, Tubman and two of her
brothers initially escaped from slavery. However, when her brothers returned
(one of them had recently become a father) she returned with them to the
plantation. She would later escape again with the help of the Underground
Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses used by abolitionists.
Tubman later recalled how she felt upon arriving a free woman in Pennsylvania:
When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to
see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun
came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in
Heaven.
3. Since none of Tubman’s family was with her in
Pennsylvania (her husband, John, stayed behind and would later remarry another
woman), she returned on several trips to help lead her relatives to freedom.
Over the next 15 years she would, with the help of others in the Underground Railroad, lead approximately 70 slaves out of
their captivity. Her efforts in the dangerous undertaking earned her the
nickname “Moses” by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who compared her to
the Hebrew leader who lead his people out of slavery in Egypt.
4. By the late 1850s, Tubman had gained renown in the
abolitionist community. J.W. Loguen, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal
Zion church, said of her, “Among slaves she is better known than the Bible, for
she circulates more freely.” Loguen introduced Tubman to the controversially violent abolitionist John
Brown, who connected her to other influential leaders in the movement.
Brown once introduced Tubman by saying, “I bring you one of the best and
bravest persons on the continent—General Tubman, we call her.” Tubman would go
on to become a powerful speaker for the antislavery movement.
5. During the Civil War, Tubman served the Union Army as a
spy, helping map out areas of South Carolina. She became the only woman to lead
men into battle during the Civil War when she guided a nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June 1863.
While under fire, Tubman’s group freed more than 700 slaves from neighboring
plantations. Both before and after her work as a spy she also served as a nurse
and cook for the Army. Despite her service, Tubman never received a regular
salary and was denied an official military pension. Tubman later
became the beneficiary of military benefits, but only as the wife of an “official” veteran, her second husband, Nelson
Davis.
6. After the Civil War Tubman became involved in other
social reform movements, including temperance, women’s rights and universal
suffrage. Tubman once gave a speech alongside suffragette leader Susan B.
Anthony and was introduced at the event as the “great Black liberator.” When a friend asked Tubman if women
should have the right to vote she responded, “I’ve suffered enough to believe
it.”
7. At a young age, Tubman suffered a traumatic head injury
that caused her to have crippling headaches and disabling epileptic seizures.
But it also gave her powerful visions, which, as a lifelong devout Christian,
she attributed to God.
The abolitionist Thomas Garrett once said about Tubman,
I never met with any person, of any color, who had more
confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul. She frequently
told me that she talked with God, and he talked to her every day of her life …
she said she never ventured only where God sent her, and her faith in the
Supreme Power was truly great.
8. Throughout her life Tubman remained either in poverty or
on the verge of destitution. She managed to scrape by on her labor, her
husband’s pension and donations from admirers. According to one biographer, she
“never drew for herself more than 20 days’ rations” during the four years she
labored during the war. Instead, she supported herself by selling pies, gingerbread and root beer to soldiers. After
the war, she used her reputation to help raise $2,000 on a scheme that turned
out to be a con. Tubman had hoped to use the proceeds to open a home for black
people but was instead attacked, bound and gagged by the con men. Wisconsin
Congressman Gerry W. Hazelton introduced legislation in 1874 that Tubman
be paid “the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army
as scout, nurse and spy,” but the bill was defeated.
9. From the proceeds of a biography written by a supporter,
Tubman was able to buy a property with two buildings on 26 acres near her home
in Auburn, New York. She later deeded the land to the African Methodist
Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church, to be used as a home for the elderly
(which she wanted to be named John Brown Hall).
At the time she attended the mostly
white Central Presbyterian Church, but she later became active in the
A.M.E. church, where her husband was a trustee. In 1908, the A.M.E. Zion
regional conference voted to take an annual collection for the maintenance of
what was now called the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged.
Tubman
herself was the only female member on a board of trustees dominated by pastors.
By 1911, she was so ill and impoverished that she was admitted to the home
named after her.
She died in 1913, with her last words being,
Source: Joe Carter
Joe Carter is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator.
Colton not only has the opportunity to use his talents as a worship leader during OKWU chapels, but outside of school, he has had different opportunities to share Christ. Not long ago, he did a concert in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and later performed some of his music at the BOK Center. Colton says there have been several positive outcomes through his music:
