^B00:00:01 [ Music ] ^M00:00:10 >> History and Biography is sponsored by Wells Fargo. ^M00:00:13 [ Music ] ^M00:00:43 >> Hello, I'm Carla Hayden and it's my pleasure to be here with the author and really wonderful person to talk about history and race and just challenges during this time, Erica Armstrong Dunbar. And she is the author of one of my new favorite books, She Came to Slay. And it's the Life and Times of Harriet Tubman. And Erica, thank you so much for doing this. We really appreciate it. And your book is really groundbreaking. >> Well, thank you. And first of all, let me thank you for inviting me on and for really taking the time to have this conversation. I love to talk about history, but more specifically, about the lives of African American women during the 19th century. And Harriet Tubman, it just became very clear early on that it was time to kind of do a bit of a refresher on Harriet Tubman. And to think about her as a person. Clearly as an activist, right now, we're sort of thinking about what social justice and activism looks like. And I think there's no better representation of it, at least in the 19th century, than Harriet Tubman. So it's wonderful to be able to talk about her. >> Now what's wonderful about your book is that you bring out things about Harriet Tubman's life that most of us who -- and some of us who think we know a little bit about history, we definitely know about the Underground Railroad and her role. But you bring out so much about her. Her role as part of the suffrage movement, the women's suffrage movement. ^M00:02:36 ^M00:02:37 >> Yeah. You know, my goal with this book -- well, what I wanted to do was to write something first that was accessible, that was attractive, that was modern and that really gave us the opportunity to think about Harriet Tubman as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a leading sort of activist on the Underground. As someone who was involved in suffrage, and always really just sort of serving as a servant leader. I think that's what she would have seen herself or called herself, maybe. And so I wanted to move away from that period that we know about with her, that sort of time period, that 10 ,11, 12 years that she was serving on the Underground. I think most people, most Americans at least know that Harriet Tubman was involved in the Underground Railroad. But I was interested in getting at who she was and what she was before that time with the Underground and after. And to kind of think about her holistically, to think about what her child life was like. And also to think about, you know, who was Harriet Tubman when she was a baby, when she was a child? And then who she was towards the end of her life. >> And I had to do this when you mentioned what she was like as a child, because it literally gave me chills to read about what she had to go through as a six-year-old. And when you think about six-year-olds, the things that were presented to her in her life, it just -- so could you elaborate on that? I don't think we know enough. >> Yeah. We know that -- well, Harriet Tubman was not born Harriet Tubman. She was born Araminta Ross. That was her name, the name given to her by her parents, Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross. And she was born to a loving family on the eastern shore of Maryland. She was one of nine children, and you know, one of the incredible things about her life was that her parents, even though they didn't live together for the entirety of their time in Maryland, they managed to do almost the impossible, which is to keep their family together. ^M00:05:15 ^M00:05:17 And you know, there's this moment for enslaved children when there's a transition to the work, to the work that one would be expected to do for the majority of their life. And that comes to Araminta when she's six years old. And she's actually hired out away from her mother and from her family. And she's basically forced to do what I would call sort of adult work. She was emptying the muskrat traps along the eastern shore of Maryland, taking kind of dead rodents out of traps. And she was doing domestic labor, difficult labor. But we think about what we expect of our children nowadays and what six-year-olds are doing. You know, they're losing their first teeth. They're starting school and of course none of this was in play for Araminta. She was exposed to a very difficult, hard life of labor away from her family, not living with them. And had to deal with illness and loneliness. And you just sort of think about the fear that must have penetrated her life. And this was something that perhaps of course she didn't know it then, but perhaps it was preparing her to be the warrior that she ended up becoming. >> That's a thought. Because of the things that she endured even after that, one aspect was being a nurse, that we don't hear about as much. ^M00:06:47 ^M00:06:49 >> Yeah. >> In the Civil War. >> Yeah, we don't. You know, these are the sort of beginning and the after of the time when the Underground -- and you know, what people need to remember is that Araminta Ross grew up really doing hard labor in the fields, growing flax, lifting heavy bags into wagons, and was really trying to make a way for herself. And at the same time, she still manages to find love. She marries. She finds and marries a free black man by the name of John Tubman in the 1840's, mid-1840's. And so, you know, she's doing what all enslaved people were doing at that time. You know, living under the oppression of white supremacy, of slavery, but still trying to keep one's family together and to live and love under oppression. And she does that. And that in itself, survival, is incredible. But then to build a network and then to finally make a decision that she was going to leave behind the family that she knew and loved and to make her sort of most courageous perhaps movement, and that was to escape from the eastern shore of Maryland. ^M00:08:11 ^M00:08:13 >> And Erica, I have to tell you, your writing is so vivid. You make her story into something that's so compelling -- her childhood, even her disappointment in love and what happened and how that fueled her. And then finding love later in life. You really bring her to life in a way that we really haven't experienced. And we thank you for that. >> Yeah. >> You also mentioned earlier that you wanted to make this book accessible and modern, and I just have to tell you one part. And you know the part, possibly, where you list Harriet's homies. ^M00:09:01 ^M00:09:04 I mean, I thought, "Okay, this is really cool." And it's Susan B. Anthony, and it's all of that. But these are Harriet's homies. Could you tell people a little bit more about who her homies were? >> Yeah. I mean, I did these call-outs in the book because I did want -- I feel like we see Harriet Tubman, we see that kind of static image of her in a history textbook, usually somewhere near Frederick Douglass. And then that's sort of it. We know kind of, "Oh, she was on the Underground." But I wanted to write something that was going to be attractive and engaging to a younger audience, to I guess maybe millennials, generation Z as well as generation X's. Folks who were sort of used to that static image of Harriet Tubman. And you know, she was -- she was a woman, right? She found love. >> Yes. >> She had disappointment. She got angry. She carried a weapon. You know, and she had her friends, her homies. And so to me, like I call my friends my homies. >> Yes. >> So I made that connection. >> Well, it makes her friends and acquaintances -- John Brown, Sojourner Truth, William Still. But the suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony. I mean, they were powerhouses. >> Yeah. >> So to have that -- and there was tension from what I understand between the suffrage movement and women's rights and rights for blacks. >> Yeah, you know, in many ways, as we move into this moment where we're celebrating or commemorating the anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, you know, Harriet Tubman is sort of right in there. She was really marching or at least advocating for suffrage for women as early as 1860. She's with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, other white suffragists who were pushing the needle, attempting to get women the right to vote. And there was great tension, and this is something we've got to kind of reckon with as we move into this moment where we're celebrating the right to vote for women. We know that actually black women don't really receive that right, or at least it's withdrawn from them over time. And Tubman is in this interesting position, because she's worked with these women, these white suffragists. They're all abolitionists, right? They were all involved in the cause to end slavery. They helped her financially. They helped her friends and family, and so they were allies in that respect, but many of them were quite angry that black men had been given the right to vote with the 15th Amendment and that they were still shut out, that they still were disenfranchised. And really Tubman felt like she had to choose, but she didn't. She actually walked that line which is amazing. She was a politician in part because she had relationships with this older generation of white women involved in abolition. But then you know, you have other people like Mary Church Dorrell and Ida B. Wells who are pushing a different agenda. And Tubman manages to walk the line between them. She still -- she remains engaged and connected to white suffragists as well as this kind of new black club women's movement who are pushing for the right to vote from a different angle. ^M00:12:49 ^M00:12:51 >> And one of the last photographs of her that people are used to seeing, she was attending for what we understand, one of the meetings, right? >> Yeah, we know that she actually attended meetings from the 1860's up, almost up to her death, close to the end of her death. She's still super involved in -- this is a woman who at this time has moved to living at a home, basically a home for the elderly that she helped to create. So like she's building homes for those who had been, who were formerly enslaved, who didn't have a social network to help them as they grew older. And one thing we have to remember is that you know, Tubman remained -- she was poor most of her life. She struggled financially, and she understood this was the fate that most formerly enslaved people dealt with, and she wanted to make certain that they would live and die in dignity. And so creating a home for black people in a moment where there's no social network for them anywhere else becomes almost as important as her work with suffrage and just improving the life conditions of black people. She was an advocate. She was a social justice activist. She wouldn't have called herself that, but that's what she was. >> What do you think she would have called herself? What did she -- when she had to put a label or talk about her contributions, what do you think she would go to? >> Yeah. >> More Christian? >> Yeah, she was a deeply -- I'm glad you brought that up. She was a deeply religious person, and someone who did not necessarily enjoy the spotlight. Unlike her contemporary, Frederick Douglass. When we think about the two of them, both from Maryland, both having spent time on the eastern shore. Both escaping. And then we think about how their lives sort of moved so differently. Douglass becomes the orator, the most-photographed man of the 19th century. He publishes his autobiography, has a newspaper. Everyone knows him. And Tubman's situation is very different. She's in the shadows. And she must be, because she's running the Underground Railroad. She's bringing people back and forth out of enslavement. And when we think about her returning to the eastern shore of Maryland, up to 13 times rescuing between 60 and 70 people. You know, that task is so herculean that it's almost -- it's almost hard to kind of believe that it actually happened. But we know it did. And Douglass even made comments about how spectacular that was, and that she didn't get enough sort of respect and material wealth from it. So I think she would have called herself -- if she called herself a leader, which I'm not sure she would have, it would have been a servant leader. That everything she did, she offered this over and over again. Everything she did was because of her God. And so her deep Christianity, her faith fueled her. >> And you included a photograph of the eastern shore to show how tricky that terrain is and still remains. And to think about it, and then all of her early chores and things that she did, she had the physical strength. But she also had that mental just grit when you think about it. Do you wonder at times -- when you talk about the difference with Douglass and Tubman at the time, did some of the difference have to do with her being a woman? Did she realize that? >> Almost certainly. Yeah, that's a great question, because it asks us to think about enslavement and fugitivity, escaping and gender. And what we know is that the majority of those who made this bold act of resistance by running from their enslavers, the majority of them were men. And the majority of them were young men, in part because it was likely that if they had children or a wife that they may not have lived on the same farm, as was the case with Araminta Ross, with Harriet Tubman. And for many women, they were left on the farm or the plantation taking care of children in their youngest, kind of most physically able years. And the idea of attempting to escape with a baby or, you know, leaving them behind was just too unimaginable for most. Harriet Tubman wasn't in that position. She did not have children. She had family that she left behind. But you know, of course her escape makes her somewhat unique because of her gender. But then afterwards, I think there's clearly the acceptance of men taking to the political stage, the political platform in a way that Douglass did, that wasn't quite as open for women in the middle of the 19th century. And in some part, that's a reason why Tubman isn't a part of that political movement. She's behind the scenes, not up front with all the glory. We don't actually glorify her until many, many, many years after her death. >> Many years. And one of her homies was Sojourner Truth who has that famous saying, you know, about being a woman. And they interacted some, right? >> They did. And this was of course during the moment of the Civil War. And you know, both Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman came from the experience of being enslaved. Sojourner Truth of course, a northern experience with slavery and then freedom, right? And with Tubman, her experience was very different. And they actually did not agree on some things politically. Sojourner Truth was much more of a fan of Abraham Lincoln than was Harriet Tubman at first. Tubman kind of later on changes her tune a bit about Lincoln. But Tubman did not really trust Abraham Lincoln, and she did not believe -- this is of course during the era of the Civil War. She wondered what it was going to look like. Before that, she was homies with people like John Brown. And John Brown is -- >> That's pretty radical. >> It doesn't get any more radical than that, right? She is engaged with him. She knows that he is planning this insurrection. She knows. He comes to her. She's up in Canada. He comes to her because he feels like she is someone who can harness energy and the support of other black people to overthrow the nation and to do it by force, right? And she's down. She is like, "Okay, let's go." >> She's ready. >> She is ready in a way that Douglass was not. You know, there's this moment when John Brown approaches Douglass and says, you know, "Join me." And Douglass is like, "Look, this is a fool's errand." >> He says, "No, I'd rather not." And she's ready to roll. >> She is. She is. >> Yeah. >> So she's radical. >> She's ready to roll. In fact, you have in terms of modern again, you have some of her sayings and you say, let me rap to you. ^M00:21:00 ^M00:21:03 And you have some really cool things that Harriet Tubman said. And in fact, this famous quote, "Let me rap to you real quick Harriet Tubman quotes." And that making it accessible and bringing the story to life, you were also able to deal with difficult aspects, especially about being a woman and being a slave. And you handled that very truthfully but delicately. And I think that speaks to the power of your writing. >> Thank you. You know, I do know that a younger generation of readers may not be interested or want to deal with the trauma that slavery always imposes on us. There's nothing easy about it. >> Right. >> And there's sometimes an attempt to just say, "Okay, I don't want to remember that part of our history, of our nation's history." And I think right now, that's very clear as we're dealing with monuments and what history looks like, what it means, how we represent ourselves as a nation. But you know, I argue as a historian, I'm always going to say that you must understand the past, no matter how difficult and thorny and uncomfortable it is. Because it's what informs our present, and if we want to change, if we want progress, we have to reconcile with the difficulty of the past. Yet I still know it's difficult. So one of the ways -- one of my techniques, like I'm a teacher, right? So I'm meeting people where they are, meeting students, meeting readers where they are. And to make it a little more modern, to have these call-outs like, "Let me rap to you real quick." I mean, that's what I would say to a friend of mine when I'm on the phone. Like, "Let me rap to you real quick." But that's basically what Tubman was saying. And I also wanted us to be familiar with her words. We're so focused on images, the few images that we have of her. You know, she was someone who did -- she had her narrative, her autobiography penned by someone else. But I wanted us to also be able to focus on the words that she spoke and to do it in a way that was relatable. ^M00:23:32 ^M00:23:34 >> And there was so -- it's something she said, "I've seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave." And that's -- and she helped people make that decision now, in terms of not wanting to go back. And her determination and all of that. >> Yeah. >> It's something. I had -- >> It's real. >> Yeah. "I had reasoned this out in my mind. There was one of two things I had a right to: liberty or death. And if I could not have one, I would have the other. For no man should take me alive. I should fight for my liberty as long as my strengths lasted. And when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me." That's pretty powerful. ^M00:24:26 ^M00:24:27 >> It is. >> Pretty powerful. >> We get back to this -- the word that jumps out at me is liberty, right? And this is the language that the Founding Fathers were using in the 1770's and '80's. And this is the language that enslaved people and formerly enslaved people held to as well, that this was about a fight for a right to be free. And that if that was not an option, that the alternative might have to be not living. Death. And even that, that's a choice, right? That's a choice to be able to live or die. And it reminds us once again that Tubman was willing to fight for freedom, for liberty up to the death. And every time she returned to the eastern shore of Maryland, she put her life in jeopardy. Shuttling her friends and her family members, her aged parents, almost all of her siblings she extracted from the jaws of slavery. That is incredible. ^M00:25:36 ^M00:25:38 >> And the thought of her liberating her elderly parents is a story that is remarkable when you think about it, what that took. And that they lived out the rest of their lives together, that they had a love story. They went through so much, and it's in here as well. And that she gave them that gift. >> Yeah. >> You just love her. You just love her and enjoy it. >> And you love her parents too. >> The parents. And their story. And to make it real, at the end, you do a little something about what it might look like if she was -- if she's remembered. >> We'll see. >> If she's remembered in that way. But the movie, the recent movie -- and I know you were part of that and able to give so much information. The photograph -- this last photograph -- this is the one that we had never seen before. >> Yeah. >> And it shows her at a time when she said you usually would see her -- she's older and everything. But to see her dressed well, firm, strong. You say, "This is the person who did so many things." >> Yeah. You know, when that photograph which now appears at the National Museum of African American History and Culture -- it was this joint venture I know with you all -- to in some ways rescue it and then share it with the public. You know, that is an image of Tubman that most of us prior to -- what was it? The year before last whenever you all acquired it, that's an image that we're not accustomed to, right? We're accustomed to her elderly, maybe hands clasped, shoulders hunched, head covered. This is a young woman, right? This photo was taken sometime in the late 1860's and so after the war. But we see her just sort of proud and the word that comes to mind is fierce. You know, she is just -- >> Fierce. >> About the business and fierce in every way. And almost like, "Okay, of course I just rescued hundreds of people in South Carolina." >> Right. >> "You know, 60-70 people from Maryland. That's what I do. I'm a boss." >> She's a boss who came to slay. She Came to Slay. And you can see it. And we just all I think -- all of us owe you so much in terms of bringing that spirit to life and bringing her life into a form that gives you chills, makes you think. There were a couple of times that I could chuckle, because she was -- she had a personality. And that comes through. >> Yeah. >> And we just all thank you for bringing Harriet Tubman into this modern age, Erica. Thank you. >> Thank you. It's an honor. I always say this. I'm a fortunate woman because I get to do what I love which is to study and write about black women in particular. And so it's an honor to hear you say that and to have readers enjoy their time reading She Came to Slay. But it's also an obligation and one that I don't take lightly. And so I'm super grateful to have the opportunity to simply share her story with another generation, a current generation of social activists. So thank you. >> It gives women something to hold onto and encourage them. So thank you so much. >> Thank you. ^M00:29:43 [ Music ] ^E00:30:23