In April 2016, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that the new $20 bill will honor Harriet Tubman. Tubman is an American legend who escaped from slavery and returned to rescue countless slaves as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Here are a few interesting facts about her voracious quest to free those who were enslaved.
Born into slavery, Tubman endured a terrifying life in her youth. Separated from her family and hired out to other households, she was beaten regularly. On one occasion she was beaten so severely that she was left with permanent epilepsy. Three of her sisters were sold to a faraway household and never seen again.
From an early age, she was inspired by her mother Rit Green. After losing three daughters to the slave trade, Green received news that her youngest son, Moses, was also going to be sold. She hid him for a month, and when a slave trader and plantation owner came to take him, Green yelled out, “You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.” The sale was immediately canceled, and Tubman learned a valuable lesson about the power of defiance.
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She ran with her two brothers but they decided to turn back and insisted that she come with them. On her second journey, she went alone, relying on courageous strangers who helped smuggle her from Maryland via the Underground Railroad. When she entered into the free state of Pennsylvania, she later recalled: “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