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Harriet Tubman and the civil rights movement
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Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Maryland in 1820. She was a house servant at ages five through six and became a field worker at age seven. She received an injury while protecting another slave from an angry overseer and was hit on the head. She would fall into deep sleeps randomly for the rest of her life. She married John Tubman in 1844 who was also a free black man.
In 1849, Tubman thought that she would be sold so she decided to run away. She left at night on foot. Tubman got help from a white woman along the way. She followed the North Star at night. She finally got to Pennsylvania and then to Philadelphia. Once she got there she got a job and started saving money. The following year she returned and took her sister and her two children to freedom. She went back to the South to rescue her brother and two others. She went back a third time for her husband but he had married someone else. She wound up taking other slaves back with her.
She kept going back again and again. She thought of clever plans that helped make her trick the plantation owners. She would take the master's horse for the first part of the journey. She would also leave on a Saturday night, since runaway notices couldn't be placed in newspapers until Monday morning. She would also carry a drug to use on a baby if its crying might put them in danger. She would carry a gun too which she used to threaten the fugitives if they became too tired or decided to turn back. She would say, “You’ll be free or die.”
If she was caught, the person that caught her would be paid $40,000! One time she heard somebody reading her wanted poster and it said that she couldn’t read. She then took out a book and pretended to read.
She made the dangerous trip to the south 19 ti...
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...h education and relief. What a busy lady! Tubman still struggled with money for the rest of her life. She didn’t receive money for her services in the Civil War until 1890.
As Tubman got older, the head injury she got early in her life became more painful. She got brain surgery at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital to take away the pain and "buzzing" she experienced regularly. Tubman was eventually put into the rest home named in her honor. She died at 90.
A liberty ship was named after Tubman in 1944. This was the first liberty ship to be named after a black woman. She received a stamp in her honor in 1978. Her rest home was granted historical landmark status in 1974.
Harriet Tubman was a woman of many jobs and not only did she do them very well but she did them with love and with God in her heart. She is one of the most influential woman in U.S. history.