But we can ride out and make something happen.
She wasn’t 19 and dancing was not her jam.
She was 29.
And, man oh man, did she know how to ride.
Born enslaved in 1820, Araminta Ross worked as a house servant at the age of 6.
By the time she turned 13, she worked in the fields on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was 29 when she got wind that she, along with the other enslaved Black people on the plantation, would be sold. It was at this point that she resolved to run away. The business of running away as an enslaved person was all hush hush and under cover. It took a lot of stealth and underground preparation to make a successful run for the north.
Aided by a white woman, she boarded the railroad, alone, dead set on becoming free.
She followed the North Star by night, arriving in the state of Pennsylvania and then traveled to Philadelphia. She worked there and saved her money. A year later, she went back south to get her enslaved sister and her two children. She made another trip to bring up her enslaved brother and two other men. She escorted her 70-year-old parents to freedom too.
Having taken her husband’s last name and preferring her mother’s name to her own, Araminta Ross is best known as Harriet Tubman.
Harriet was strategic, cunning and functioned with nerves of steel. Each trip was a covert operation that ran at great risk. She was the conductor who ran the ground game expertly. Under threat of death and with a $40,000 bounty on her head, she ran the dangerous routes many times. She could not have done it alone. Harriet relied on white people who lined the underground railroad at every stop. Together they ensured a safe passage to freedom for 300 enslaved Blacks over 19 trips in a 10 year span of time.
How many trips do you have in you?
Harriet made 19 trips to make equity a possibility. In 2024, we can go far together, too.
The perilous road they trod is easy now in comparison, made smooth by the sweat, risk and death of those before us. Our task now is to first see, strengthen our resolve and then strategically move in tangible, visible ways to make life equitable for all. They did it when the risk of death hung in the balance. We can do it now by making a difference. It’s time to take our place on the railroad to equity. We have conductors and advocates aplenty to make equity real in America.
Let’s ride.
It took the work of Black and Whites working together to make freedom possible in Harriet’s lifetime. Now, with the combined efforts of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, whites and other identities, we can work as one to make equity ring. It will take the best of us to pull it off. That was true then. It’s still true now.
We are better, together.
Tracy
Tracy Carmen-Jones
Partner
ChoicePoints Learning
www.choicepointslearning.com