Harriet Tubman Should Be on the Twenty Dollar Bill

If you haven’t seen HARRIET, the new motion picture about Harriet Tubman, you should get out and see it right away. Everyone in the United States of America should see it.

 

Harriet Tubman was a true patriot and a courageous character. If she had been a man and white, she would still, to this day, be as highly regarded as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, but because she was a black woman, she gets a couple paragraphs (if that) in most history books.

 

We hear a little more about black men in history, but if any of them had lived the life Harriet did, their  histories and likenesses would be in every black home (and lots of white ones) forevermore. People who accomplished less, under far less perilous conditions (the Kennedys, Obamas and Nelson Mandela), are.

 

(Side note: We appear  eager to elevate men to secular glory. It’s time to elevate scores of women who have undergone far worse struggles and managed, against enormous odds, to triumph…)

 

At the very least, Harriet Tubman should be on the twenty dollar bill, relegating Andrew Jackson’s racist, bloody visage to the ash heap of history. She has earned the eternal gratitude and remembrance of every non-racist human being in this country.

 

When people, including abolitionists, told her she couldn’t do something–it was too dangerous–she did it, anyway. She became so successful getting black slaves north that she became legendary in her own time. The powers-that-be assumed she was a tall, ballsy black man. Her people called her “Moses” for taking them to the Promised Land, north to freedom, so “Moses” was the name printed on the WANTED posters.

 

She became a spy for the North during the Civil War and led a regiment of black soldiers against the South. During her time as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she got every family member out except one sister (who was murdered before her eyes) while getting out scores of others who were equally eager  to escape from bondage.

 

It was a fearful, perilous time. Danger lurked everywhere. But Tubman claimed that God told her where to go and what to do, and she survived to old age after half a lifetime of struggling to end the hard lives of as many black folks as she could.

 

She should be a national treasure. She truly was Moses for a lot of black families.

 

May her legacy expand to fill every heart.