Case Study Of Harriet Tubman's Leadership

In 1850, Harriet Tubman led her first successful rescue of enslaved African-Americans across the Mason-Dixie line to a place black people could live free. She did this at a time when injustice towards African-Americans was at an all-time high, women across all ethnic backgrounds were suppressed and the Fugitive Slave Act had just been passed, warranting their return to enslavers if she and her passengers were caught. Throughout her lifetime, Harriet Tubman led over 300 enslaved people to freedom by way of almost 20 journeys back into slave states to conduct rescue missions. She was an incredi-ble freedom fighter in American history but more than that, she is a model for how effective the American black woman leader can be, even in the midst

Direction of the Study We will use critical theory and leadership theory as a guide to help us navigate this study. Harriet Tubman is the sample in this research of the 19th century population of black women an although, there is room for individual differences, the circumstances Harriet Tubman found her-self in were presumably not different from the circumstances other enslaved black women found themselves in. Although, historians claim there were likely many black women who led in some form of resistance or another, Harriet Tubman is the one on whom we have the most literature and doc-umentation and the one with whom history has remembered most vividly.

Hypothesis/ Intended Outcomes By exploring how overt prolonged injustice affected Harriet Tubman and the formation of her leadership, one can better understand the ways in which oppression forms the black wom-an leader today in a society with recurring gender and racial