Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

In 2030, America's national bank, the Federal Reserve, will issue a new $20 bill; but the face on the front side will not be that of some former president, but that of a black lady Harriet Tubman, a slave who escaped from captivity on a Maryland plantation in 1849 - twelve years before the Civil War - to flee to freedom in Pennsylvania. Railroads were a new invention at the time, but the Underground Railroad was neither a railroad, nor literally underground. It was a clandestine network of partisans and abolitionists who together organized the escape of slaves from southern states, and their transfer to freedom and safety in the north or in Canada. It'd been set up at the end of the 18th century by abolitionists in the south and the north, both Black and White, and notably by Quakers, as a network of safe houses and secure overnight routes by which fleeing slaves could reach the safety of the north. Contrary to a popular misconception, Harriet did not set up the Underground Railroad, but was herself one of those slaves who was spirited out of the south and taken to freedom in the north. Few of the slaves who were helped to freedom in this way had the huge courage that was needed to return to the south and help others – they faced death or worse if they were caught – but Harriet was different. It didn't take her long to sign up to use her experience and bravery to help others like herself, undertaking a total of thirteen journeys back to Maryland, during which, as she later said, she "never lost a single passenger." Though some books claim that Harriet accompanied up to 300 other slaves on their journey to freedom, Harriet herself put the figure a lot lower than that; conservative estimates suggest that she personally helped close to a hundred slaves to freedom, including members of her family. However in addition to those she personally guided to freedom, Harriet helped organize the escapes of hundreds more black Americans along the Underground Railroad. Born around 1822, Harriet was still a child when she suffered a serious head injury at the hands of a slave overseer on the plantation where her family lived. Fortunately she survived, and her experience filled her with a determination to fight the iniquities of slavery. When tensions between the Confederacy and the Union eventually boiled over into Civil War, Harriet enlisted as a cook and a nurse with the Union army, but when commanders learned of her experience and heroism as a "conductor" with the Underground Railroad, she was soon tasked with more important duties. Working as an armed scout, she was the first woman to lead an armed raid into Confederate territory, guiding troops for the attack on Combahee Ferry, where 700 slaves were liberated. She continued working with the Union army until after the end of the Civil War in 1865, after which she devoted her energy and the very little money that she had, to helping Black people in the north where she had settled. A deeply religious person, she was moved to action by a strong feeling of right and wrong, and a determination to fight injustice wherever she found it. This led her to expand her crusade for the rights of Black people in the USA to a new and broader field, the rights of women whatever their color – becoming one of the first figureheads of the American Suffragist movement. By the end of the nineteenth century, Tubman had many admirers and supporters; yet although she'd become a well-known figure, and was recognized for her tireless action for the causes of civil rights and women's rights, she never retired to a comfortable lifestyle. Regularly troubled by the long-term consequences of the violence she had suffered as a child, she was eventually admitted in 1911 to the home for poor Blacks in Auburn, New York, that she herself had founded, dying there two years later at the age of about 90. Although Harriet was certainly seen as a pioneering reformer during her lifetime, it wasn't until after the Civil Rights movement gathered pace in the 1950s that her unique contribution to American history began to be recognized, and it was not until the start of the twenty-first century that she started to receive the real national recognition that she deserved. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, in Maryland, was opened by Barack Obama in 2013, and was followed by the opening in 2017 of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn. Once her portrait adorns all US $20 bills, the story of this exceptional American hero will be told worldwide.