Harriet Tubman is an American hero, and she deserves to be remembered and recognized as one. So I for one will be waiting impatiently for the day when I can see her face every time I go to the ATM. But I have to wonder if Jack Lew and the others at the US Treasury really looked at her – really studied her life and work, her words and the movement she was a part of – before they made their decision. Because Harriet Tubman was a dangerous woman, and she sets a dangerous example for today.
She was a general in the guerrilla war against the slave-owners, the wealthiest and most powerful men of her time. These men, as Frederick Douglass said, controlled “the pen, the purse, and the sword” in the United States. They were leading businessmen, they owned or influenced the big newspapers, they ran Congress, and they commanded the military. And the campaigns of Harriet Tubman still dealt them a serious blow. It wasn’t so much because of the number of slaves she freed – thousands out of a population of millions – but the effect she had on the American consciousness.
The slave-owners were crafty as well as powerful. They poured tremendous resources into convincing white Americans that slavery, in fact, was not all that bad. That it was as good for the slaves as it was for themselves. That the slaves were happy where they were and emancipation would really be an injury for them. They funded scientists, journalists, and theologians to justify slavery and defend it from the abolitionists.
This great lie – that slavery was a natural and moral condition for Black people – kept a firm grip on America’s soul, and it allowed the slave-owners to maintain their own grip on America’s economic and political life. But all over the South, slaves exposed the brutal reality of the system for what it was, just by trying to survive: They ran away. And runaway slaves meant that the slave-owners were liars, and that slavery was wicked. Another side of the same coin, runaway slaves demonstrated that they were, in fact, human. They could think and organize for themselves and would risk their lives to save their families and take control of their future.
The Underground Railroad wasn’t plotted by an organizing committee of abolitionists. It was the result of people moving out of necessity – responding to the intolerable conditions of slavery. It took clear leadership, provided by Tubman as much as anyone, to turn it from a spontaneous motion into a highly organized and ideologically effective movement.
Under the combined force of Tubman, John Brown, those who fought back against the “fugitive slave” hunters, and the other “running abolitionists” on the one hand; and Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and the rest of the “writing abolitionists” on the other, the slave-owners lost their moral authority. It wasn’t the final blow: that would happen later, when hundreds of thousands of Black workers freed themselves and joined the Union advance. (Harriet Tubman was there for this stage as well, putting her great knowledge of the terrain in South Carolina and elsewhere to use in planning raids.). But it did weaken and isolate the Slave Power, taking from them what had been one of their sturdiest supports and setting the stage for what was to come.
We who believe that there is still more freedom to be won would do well to learn from Harriet Tubman and the movement she helped lead. We too face an enemy who controls “the pen, the purse, and the sword,” not just in the United States but throughout the world. They too have their scientists, their journalists, their theologians and their preachers and more.
And we also find ourselves in a time where people are forced to take drastic and illegal measures just to survive. The thousands of people who’ve lost their homes to speculation, healthcare crises, unemployment, and gentrification schemes have not disappeared. Many of them have set up encampments – tent cities – all around the country. These are, in many cases, illegal occupations of private and public land. They’re met with violence from police, destruction of their new homes, and the theft of their property (including medications and identification) by the government.
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1935819_884878514960740_3952861036010669047_n.jpg” credit=”Reuters” alt=”Tent city in Seattle, WA” align=”center” lightbox=”off” caption=”Tent city in Seattle, WA” captionposition=”left”]
It’s just people trying to live in the face of a system that wants them dead, or at the very least out of sight. But it’s also dangerous: not to “public health” (the excuse often given for evicting people in tent cities) but to the moral authority of the people in power. Tent cities show that “the recovery” is a lie, that the people who own the economy have no solutions to the economic crisis, and that a lot of us are just a paycheck or a medical emergency away from the street. And they show that poor people aren’t objects of pity and punishment, but people on the front lines of a war that’s coming for all of us.
Tent cities aren’t plotted by committees of organizers, but they are getting organized. You can look to the work of Chaplains on the Harbor in rural Washington, or the newly formed Salinas Union of the Homeless in California, or Open Table Nashville in Tennessee to see what’s happening. The spontaneous motion of the poor, coupled with their growing political clarity and coordination, will become a powerful force in American life. They’ll reach out to a scared and unsettled middle class, desperate for stability and security, embrace them and lead the way forward: like Harriet Tubman and her co-conspirators led the nation past slavery.
And tent cities are only one example, one of many Underground Railroads with the potential to deal heavy moral and political blows the owners of the economy. Harriet Tubman is more than an icon of the great struggle to end slavery. She’s the dangerous leader we need today.