On Veterans Day, November 11, 2024, the state of Maryland posthumously named Harriet Tubman, a one-star brigadier general in Maryland’s National Guard. Many people know about Harriet Tubman’s legacy of liberation as she freed herself from slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and then returned to the South more than a dozen times, risking her own life and freedom each time, to lead groups of family members and friends to freedom, too. Her fellow abolitionist John Brown first called her “General Tubman,” a name he knew fit “one of the bravest persons on this continent.” Now, this new honor officially recognizes her service and leadership during the Civil War – another key piece of her extraordinary legacy.
She was recruited to serve as a spy and scout by Union officers who already knew her reputation and valued her familiarity with the South, fierce intelligence, and fearlessness. While stationed in South Carolina, she was quickly able to build a network of local scouts and informants from nearby plantations using many of the same clandestine skills that made her such a successful conductor on the Underground Railroad. Of course, she risked being captured and executed if discovered, but that was the same risk she was willing to take at every step throughout her life. Fear did not turn her around.
Her most legendary military accomplishment came in June 1863 when she became the first woman in U.S. history to oversee a military action in a time of war by coordinating the successful Combahee River Raid with Colonel James Montgomery. They and their troops liberated more than 750 men, women, and children during that raid, destroying a Confederate depot and nine plantations as they went. She then immediately recruited dozens of those newly freed men to enlist as members of the Union 2nd South Carolina Colored Infantry. In addition to serving as a spy and military leader, she also worked as a skilled nurse–and in 1865, was appointed nurse matron at Fort Monroe’s Colored Hospital in Hampton, Virginia. Despite all of her wartime contributions, her original petitions to the U.S. government to receive a military pension for her service were denied. But this new formal honor is a powerful reminder that despite deep disappointment, despite long delays, history will always keep moving forward.
This reminder and the official ceremony held at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center in Dorchester County, Maryland, came at a deeply symbolic moment. Just days earlier, Angela Alsobrooks was elected as Maryland’s first African American Senator. In the neighboring state of Delaware, U.S. Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, who was already the first African American and first woman to represent Delaware in Congress, was also elected as Delaware’s next Senator. As current Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA) ends her own appointed term, Senators-elect Alsobrooks and Blunt Rochester will become the first two Black women ever to serve together in the U.S. Senate. Their victories also make them just the third and fourth Black women elected to the Senate in our nation’s history, following Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) and Senator, now Vice President, Kamala Harris (D-CA).
History will keep moving forward. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, who is Maryland’s first African American governor, said this at the ceremony: “Harriet Tubman lived the values and virtues that I was taught when I served in the United States Army, and many of the people here today learned too: Live mission first, people always. Lead with honor, integrity, duty, and courage. Leave no one behind. And with each act of courage, Harriet Tubman helped bring us together as a nation and a people. She fought for a kind of unity that can only be earned through danger, risk, and sacrifice. And it is a unity we still benefit from to this day.” Harriet Tubman is an eternal inspiration and an example of the leadership our nation deserves.
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Marian Wright is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org. – See more at: http://www.childrensdefense.org/newsroom/child-watch-columns/child-watch-documents/MoralCourageStandingUpForWhatIsRight.html#sthash.dxkocR2X.dpuf
