Afterlives: An Unscripted Night with Harriet Tubman

a $40,000 bounty was offered for her capture dead or alive last week we launched this series afterlives with a promise to sit down with history's lost voices and tonight we're sitting with the woman they called moses but sitting with the spirit of harriet tubman you realize very quickly that moses is the wrong name it's too mythic it's too soft it makes her a character in a fable when she was a general in a war and it was a war we get that part wrong we think of the underground railroad as a quiet desperate flight and it was but in her hands it was also a military operation she made at least 13 trips back into

maryland 13 she almost always left on a saturday night because the runaway notices couldn't be placed in the newspapers until monday morning that gave her a two day head start strategic she used spirituals songs like go down moses not just for comfort but as coded signals to communicate with passengers in the field and she carried a pistol not for the slave catchers but for any of the people she was leading who lost their nerve and wanted to turn back because a single person returning could compromise the entire network dead men tell no tales but neither do people who make it to freedom she never had to use it but everyone knew she would that's not

a guide that's a commander so where does that come from that certainty that willingness to do whatever it takes i've been sitting with her story with her words and it's clear it wasn't just moral outrage it was divine intelligence when she was a teenager an overseer threw a two pound metal weight at another enslaved person but it hit harriet in the head it nearly killed her for the rest of her life she suffered from seizures what she called spells but during these episodes she had visions vivid prophetic visions she believed god was speaking to her directly showing her the paths to take warning her of danger her faith wasn't just a comfort it was her

navigation system her intelligence network she would say i always told god i'm going to hold steady onto you and you got to see me through and she believed he did every single time looking back ten years from now i think we'll say this was the moment we finally understood her we'll stop calling her a passenger guide and start calling her what she was general tubman during the civil war she became the first woman in us history to lead an armed military raid the combahee river wade she guided union gunboats through confederate torpedoes she had helped map and in one night freed more than 750 enslaved people that's more than she freed in a decade on

the railroad she wasn't just helping people escape the system she was burning the system to the ground and what's the one thing to remember from all this the single idea worth holding onto it's that the fight was never over after the war she didn't rest she fought for women's suffrage alongside susan b anthony when the government denied her a soldier's pension for years she fought for that too and in her old age she established the harriet tubman home for the aged a place to care for the sick and poor her vision of freedom wasn't just about breaking chains it was about building a world where people were truly cared for from beginning to end freedom

isn't a destination you arrive at it's a road you build and then you keep walking it for everyone else