America’s Civil Right Movement was born out of the 1950s. However, Negroes’ battle against equality and racism began during the slavery era. There were several key blacks who fought to have slavery outlawed. They were called “abolitionists” or those who wished to abolish slavery. Author, Frederick Douglass, the infamous Dred Scott and freedom fighters, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, each attacked the social ill. But, it wasn’t just men alone in the fight.

Female abolitionists, writers, Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth (Ain’t I a Woman) paved the road for black women’s rights. One such woman benefitted from having her “sistas” in the fight. Her name was Harriet Tubman.

Born in 1820, she was a runaway slave from Dorchester County, Maryland. She took on slavery’s brutal era headlong. Tubman joined other runaway slaves, sympathetic whites and Quaker activists to implement the Underground Railroad to freedom.

The Underground Railroad were routes to series of “safe houses” that assisted southern slaves to escape up north. Safe houses belonged to Quaker families and others who fed their “travelers” and hid them from slave catchers and their bloodhounds. These routes consisted of running hundreds of miles in the dead of night. Communication was done with hand signs and “markers”. Silence was a vital part in these missions.

For over a decade, Tubman went down South to rescue slaves. She brought over 300 Africans through the Railroad to eventual freedom. As a black woman, she became the “most wanted fugitive” in the South. A $25,000 bounty was put on her head. Nevertheless, she avoided capture many times by her cunning deception and knowledge of the terrain.

When the Civil War broke out, she assisted for the Union’s cause. She worked in the Army as a cook and nurse. But, in 1863, she took a deadly role as a spy during a campaign in South Carolina. She and a group of freed slaves served as spies and scouts. They did reconnaise on the region; reporting on Confederate troop movements and discovering hidden bases. As a woman, she embraced being on the front lines and in the field hospital.

During one harrowing experience, a man was suffering from dysentery. As he was about to die, Tubman found some water lilies and geranium and boiled them in a pot. She served the homemade brew to her patient. In time, the disease vanished. She saved his life and provided Union forces a medicine that saved dozens of soldiers’ from dying.

Harriet Tubman lived an exciting and harrowing experience. She left slavery in Maryland, and died a free, black heroine in Auburn, New York (1913). She was an abolitionist, a freedom fighter and a humanitarian all rolled into one black and beautiful WOMAN.