04 / 50 · Freedom & civil rights

Harriet Tubman

United States · c. 1822–1913

Tubman escaped slavery and repeatedly returned to help others reach freedom through the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War she also worked in support of Union forces, and later advocated women’s suffrage.

Her life brings practical care, political resistance and extraordinary personal risk into the same story. Accounts of her words were often recorded by others; attribution to the recorder matters.

“I looked at my hands, to see if I was de same person now I was free.”

Reported by Sarah Hopkins Bradford in Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886).