Mid-Shore Life

By Dwayne Eutsey

On October 3, 1849, 160 years ago this past Saturday, the following notice from Eliza Ann Brodess, from Bucktown in Dorchester County, appeared in a local newspaper called the Cambridge Democrat:

Three Hundred Dollars Reward.

Ran away from the subscriber on Monday the 17^th ult., three negroes, named as follows: HARRY, aged about 19 years…he is of a dark chestnut color, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high; BEN, aged about 25 years, is very quick to speak when spoken to, he is of a chestnut color, about six feet high; MINTY, aged about 27 years, is of a chestnut color, fine looking, and about 5 feet high. One hundred dollars reward will be given for each of the above named negroes, if taken out of the State, and $50 each if taken in the State. They must be lodged in Baltimore, Easton or Cambridge Jail, in Maryland.

The “fine looking…5 feet high” Minty the notice refers to was an African American woman originally named Araminta Ross, now more famously known as Harriet Tubman.

Brodess posted the notice after Tubman and two of her brothers made their first attempt to escape race slavery on the Eastern Shore. They didn’t make it to freedom that time, but as Tubman would go on to demonstrate throughout her life, she wasn’t one to let setbacks hold her down.

Not long after she and her brothers returned to Bucktown, Tubman successfully escaped to the North with the help of the Underground Railroad and the community of Quakers living in the Preston area. Even so, she secretly returned to the Shore numerous times in the years leading up to the Civil War. At great risk to her life and liberty, Tubman helped lead hundreds of escaped slaves to the “promised land” of freedom, earning her the well-deserved epithet “Moses.”

The name also reflects the role faith played in her freedom struggle. After a slaveholder delivered a serious blow to her head when she was a teen, Tubman had visions and premonitions for the rest of her life. Believing these experiences to be divinely inspired, she was confident God guided and protected her successful efforts to emancipate slaves.

She once observed: “I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Although we’ve come a long way since Eliza Ann Brodess’s notice appeared in 1849, slavery remains a vexing worldwide problem. According to Free the Slaves, an international human rights organization, there are at least 27 million people worldwide living in slavery today, more than at any other time in human history.

(For more information on modern slavery, see: http://www.freetheslaves.net/Page.aspx?pid=301)

It’s only fitting, then, that Free the Slaves would reward the efforts of anti-slavery groups with the Harriet Tubman Award. Free the Slaves gave this year’s

Tubman Award (which includes a two-year $50,000 grant) to the Shramajivee Mahila Samity (SMS). This women’s association “fight

s slave marriage and other forms of domestic slavery” in India. (Free the Slaves also offers an award honoring Frederick Douglass, another anti-slavery icon from the Shore).

According to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), which partners with the SMS in the UU Holdeen India Program, the organization bravely:

“goes undercover to expose human traffickers, traces missing people, and puts pressure on their government to enact regulations to end trafficking. The organization also helps slavery survivors reunite with their families and rebuild their lives.”

(For more information on the SMS, see: http://www.freetheslaves.net/Page.aspx?pid=505).

While it’s sad to think that the tragic blight of slavery still exists in this day and age, it’s encouraging to know that the legacy of the Shore’s Harriet Tubman also lives on, struggling to keep the train of freedom and human dignity moving forward and on track around the world.

For more information, see: http://uuasocialjustice.blogspot.com/2009/09/shramajivee-mahila-samity-wins-freedom.html