Unit 4: The Secret Road to Freedom (1ère Générale)
Those who Diced with Death: The Life of Harriet Tubman
The document under study is a video about the life of Harriet Tubman, a former slave who became an abolitionist later.
This video is from TED-ed and was posted in 2018.
We have learned that Harriet Tubman was born in the 1820s in Georgia
under the name of Araminta Ross. She had 8 siblings. Her two elder sisters were
sold to other slave owners. Unfortunately, other members of her family were sold,
only her two brothers stayed with her and her father. No slave owners wanted to buy her because she was
suffering from narcolepsy. She ended up
working with her father who taught her to lumber. She married a free black man
called John Tubman in 1844. She then decided to change her name and be called
Harriet Tubman (Harriet was the name of her mother).
As she was growing up, she would encounter free black men and she would overhear them speaking about a secret way to
freedom.
Once, she tried to escape North with her brothers. However, they got lost therefore
they went back to their plantation. Then,
she had a dream about a road that led to freedom. It encouraged her to escape
alone by following the North Star. She successfully ended up in Pennsylvania in
1849. She then went back 13 times to the South to help escape other slaves (300
over 10 years). She became an active member of the Underground Railroad as she
had been a conductor. She was even nicknamed
“The Black Moses”.
She was not only an abolitionist, indeed she
also was a nurse, a spy and a scout in the Union army during the Civil War.
On top of that, after the Civil War she raised funds to make hospitals and schools for
black people. Besides, she fought for women’s right to vote in the 1870s.
To conclude, Tubman is seen as a hero as she embodied the Underground Railroad to
end slavery. She fought for women’s and black people’s rights throughout her
life. She died in 1913.
To pay tribute to her life and legacy, in 2016 a project was put in place
to have her on a twenty-dollar bill, so everybody can remember her and her
actions in their daily lives.
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