
The True Story Behind the Harriet Tubman Movie and the Reverse Underground Railroad
By Meilan Solly in Smithsonian.com
Harriet Tubman’s first act as a free woman was poignantly simple. As she later told biographer Sarah Bradford, after crossing the Pennsylvania state boundary line in September 1849, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
The future Underground Railroad conductor’s next thoughts were of her family. “I was free,” she recalled, “but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there.”
Read more: The True Story Behind the Harriet Tubman Movie
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