Why It Matters that Harriet Tubman Will Be on the $20 Bill

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 9:15 am by Carl Gregg

Why It Matters that Harriet Tubman Will Be on the $20 Bill 2017-02-24T09:15:32-05:00 Carl Gregg

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The year 2020 will be the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. To commemorate this occasion, the U.S. Treasury Department announced last year that in 2020, Andrew Jackson will be moved to the back of the $20 bill, and Harriet Tubman will be the new face on the front. This change means that African-Americans will appear on our currency for the first time in our nation’s history, and a woman will be featured for the first time in more than a century.

Regarding the significance of this change, there are “more than 8.5 billion $20 bills in circulation…. And the seven white men on the seven notes in general circulation were all dead by 1885…. More than half of American history has happened since.” There are other exciting changes coming as well, such as adding “images of Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King Jr. to the back of the $5, which has Abraham Lincoln on the front.” But for now, I would like to invite us to focus on how the life and legacy of Harriet Tubman can continue to inspire us today.

Everything I l learned in school about Harriet Tubman could fit in one sentence: she was a famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, who was known as a modern-day “Moses” for helping liberate so many enslaved people (85). The announcement that she will soon be featured on the $20 bill motivated me to learn more. In reading Catherine Clinton’s excellent 2004 biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, the more I learned about Tubman, the more impressed I became.

For me, Harriet Tubman’s story hits close to home. I am in the middle of my fifth year serving a congregation in Frederick, Maryland, and Tubman was born only a little more than a hundred miles southeast, likely on the Brodess plantation near Bucktown, Maryland in Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore. Estimates of her birth year range from 1815 on her death certificate to 1820 on her gravestone to 1825, which was the year Harriet herself said she was born. In the broader sweep of history, she was born approximately two hundred years after the first enslaved Africans were sold at the Virginia colony of Jamestown in 1619. Frederick Douglass was her temporal and geographic contemporary, “born in 1818 on a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, near present-day Easton — less than thirty miles from Harriet Tubman’s own place of birth” (8). Tubman died around age 90 in 1913, the same year that Rosa Parks was born (220).

Tubman’s birth name was Araminta Ross, leading to the nickname “Minty.” She was one of the last of around a dozen children born to the enslaved couple Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross. Tubman’s grandmother was brought to America on a slave ship (5), and there are a number of indications that Tubman’s grandfather was a white man, the plantation owner Atthow Pattison (6).

When Araminta, the future Harriet Tubman, was five years old she was assigned to take care of the infant of a white woman in the neighborhood. Even though she wasn’t far from home, she had to live at her new master’s house full time, and was terribly homesick. Because she was so small, she had to sit on the floor to hold the baby. In addition to caring for an infant, she was given many other household chores, and “After a long day of doing her mistress’s bidding, the five-year-old Araminta remained on duty at night, instructed to rock the cradle constantly to prevent the baby from disturbing the master or mistress. If the baby wailed, this mistress did not go to comfort her child but instead lifted her hand to grab a small whip from its shelf — to punish her [enslaved] attendant for negligence.” Tubman had scars on her neck from these whippings for the rest of her life (17-18).

Even during this early period, Tubman sometimes resisted her oppressors. One account tells us of her biting her master’s knee. In this instance, her strategy paid off: “she was left alone in the future by this master” (19). She served a number of families in similar capacities through age twelve, when she became big enough for hard labor in the fields (18-20).

In another early sign of her bravery, Araminta blocked the path of an overseer seeking to whip an enslaved field hand, who had deserted his post. Tragically, a lead weight thrown at the deserter instead hit Araminta in the head, causing a serious wound. She slipped in and out of a “lethargic sleep” for weeks (22). And for the rest of her life, “she suffered from episodes that were likened to narcoleptic spells.” As frequently as several times a day, she would, without warning—no matter what she was doing—fall into a “stupor,” then a “deep slumber.” Soon she would rouse herself and carry on with whatever she was previously doing (29). Consider how impressive it is that the entire time she was leading many successful runs on the Underground Railroad, she was often suffering from narcoleptic episodes multiple times a day.

In 1844, when Araminta was in her early 20s, she married a free black man named John Tubman (24). Tubman was the family name of several wealthy white plantation owners in Cambridge, Maryland, and “Many blacks in the area were known by the name Tubman” (24). So Araminta received the last name Tubman from her husband, but Harriet was the name she chose for herself—in honor of her mother—when she reached freedom. Many enslaved people who escaped captivity chose new names for the pragmatic reason that it made it more difficult for fugitive slave catchers to track them (33).

There were many remarkable events to come in Tubman’s life, but her escape alone was remarkable. “The overwhelming majority of successful fugitives were men. But here was a girl in her twenties, venturing out of her home counties for the first time, hoping to make it to freedom on her own” (33-34). The ninety-mile journey from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to the Pennsylvania line “would have taken Tubman anywhere from ten days to three weeks on foot” (38). During her escape, one of the first people to help Tubman head in the direction of freedom was a white woman. This act of allyship was significant because aiding a fugitive slave was a crime with stiff penalties (35).

Tomorrow, in part two of this post on “Why Harriet Tubman Still Matters Today,” I will share more about Tubman’s life and how her legacy can continue to inspire us today.

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles

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