A powerful tribute to the underground railroad leader, abolitionist, civil war hero and civil rights activist

Harriet Tubman & Boston

Boston played a central role in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.  It was a focal point for the activism and intellectual forces behind these efforts to improve human rights.  Harriet Tubman devoted her life to these causes.  As a result, it was inevitable that Tubman would have a close connection with Boston and surrounding areas. 

Abolitionist

After Tubman freed herself from slavery in 1849, she made numerous trips to Boston to meet with prominent abolitionists, advance the cause of emancipation and fight for women’s rights.  Tubman was close to Massachusetts resident Frederick Douglas and other prominent abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Higginson, and many others. 

These trips involved tremendous risk for Tubman.  As an escaped slave, under the Fugitive Slave Act she could be captured in Boston and returned to her enslaver.  Yet Tubman risked everything to connect with other leaders of the abolitionist and women’s rights movements in order raise money, generate support, and further the causes of freedom and equality for all.  During one trip, on her way to Boston in April 1860, despite being at risk for deportation to the south herself, Tubman heroically helped rescue a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the custody of United States Marshals charged with returning him to his Virginia enslaver. 

Frederick Douglas was instrumental in connecting Tubman with John Brown, and Tubman played an important role in helping Brown prepare for his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry.  It was during a trip to Boston in 1858 that Tubman met Franklin Sanborn, leading to her relationship with Brown’s “secret six”, the prominent abolitionists and politicians supporting Brown. 

Between 1859-1861, as the civil war approached, Tubman visited the area repeatedly, and gave many lectures in Boston as a heroic Underground Railroad operator and abolitionist.  Tubman was a sought-after speaker for her compelling story, powerful presence and rousing oratorical abilities. 

General Tubman

When the civil war broke out in 1861, Tubman’s connections with Boston played a critical role in Tubman’s wartime activities, leading to some of her most heroic deeds and greatest accomplishments.  Tubman spent the fall of 1861 in New England connecting with others abolitionists in Boston who were among the first to respond to the needs of the growing numbers of slaves making their way to Union outposts in the South.  Tubman decided she could help best by going to the south herself.  William LLoyd Garrison and other abolitionists introduced Tubman to Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, who arranged for Tubman to travel to Beaufort South Carolina to help the Union effort there. 

Once again, Tubman put her own personal safety aside and returned to the south, this time to a war zone.  Once there, she worked as an intelligence agent, gathering essential information on the area and Confederate activities, positions and movements, through her extensive network of former enslaved people and through her own trips into enemy territory. 

On June 1, 1863, Tubman became the first woman to plan and execute an armed expedition during the civil war, successfully freeing 800 slaves and destroying valuable confederate infrastructure and supplies.

Tubman was present at the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts regiments participation in the Union’s infamous defeat at Fort Wagner.  She knew the Fifty-Fouth’s leader, Colonel Shaw, and several members of the regiment, including Frederick Douglas’s sons, Lewis and Charles.  Her description of the battle is among the most powerful and poetic by any observer: “And then we saw the lightening, and that was the guns, and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns, and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling, and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead that we reaped.” 

Throughout this period, Tubman’s Boston connections provided critical support for her and her efforts, particularly Franklin Sanborn and his articles in the Boston Commonwealth.  By August 1864, she was back in Boston, where she met with numerous abolitionists including Sojourner Truth.  

Human Rights Crusader

After the war, Tubman continued her quest for universal human rights, fighting on behalf of women's rights and the welfare of former slaves and African Americans generally.  In the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, Tubman was a frequent visitor to Boston.  She attended numerous women’s suffrage meetings in Boston and played an important role in the fight for women's rights.  In 1897, the Woman’s Journal, the white suffragist movement’s paper, held a series of receptions in Boston honoring Harriet Tubman for her work furthering the cause of women’s rights. 

Tubman's connection with Boston continued until the end of her life.  She was an invaluable contributor to the abolitionist and women's rights movements, in Boston and elsewhere, and played an essential role in making Boston a focal point of these movements.  

In the early 20th Century, responding to the discrimination in their own community, six Black women of Boston opened the Harriet Tubman House at 37 Holyoke Street in the South End. A personal friend of Tubman, Julia O. Henson rented the Tubman House as a place of lodging for Black females who had recently migrated from the South. Later on, the Harriet Tubman House was moved to Mrs. Henson’s own home at 25 Holyoke Street. There, she and her friends, Cornelia Robinson, Annie W. Young, Fannie R. Contine, Jestina A. Johnson, Sylvia Fern, and Hibernia Waddell, organized a settlement house for the purpose of “assisting working girls in charitable ways.”

The Harriet Tubman House took in young female boarders, providing them with food, clothing, shelter, and friendship while they adjusted to their new environment. In 1906, the six founders incorporated their organization according to the dictates of Massachusetts state law. Cornelia Robinson was elected President of the Board and Matron. By this time, the Harriet Tubman House had grown into an important community institution, gathering support from neighborhood churches and women’s clubs. Harriet Tubman was made Honorary President of the Harriet Tubman House during one of her visits to Boston four years before her death in 1913.

Today, the legacy of the Harriet Tubman House continues in the work of the United South End Settlements.  

Harriet Tubman Park was the first park in Boston with a statue honoring a woman.  It is one of the few, maybe the only, park in the country with statues by two African-American women artists.  Read about these two remarkable artists below.   

Fern Cunningham

Harriet Tubman Memorial, STEP ON BOARD, 1999

Born January 24, 1949 in Queens, New York, Cunningham's early years provided her with a rich array of travel and learning experiences, including summer (1967) of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Fountainebleau, France. Her mother, also an artist, continuously encouraged her interest in sculpture. In 1971, she was awarded the BFA Degree in sculpture from the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts. While continuing to refine her sculptural skills, she launched her art teaching career at the Cambridge Art Center, followed by the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, Boston. After a period devoted to her children, she resumed teaching in Boston Public Schools. From 1983 until 2015, she taught art at the Park School in Brookline.

As her reputation grew, Cunningham increasingly received commissions from both public and private sources. Among Cunningham's public works are: Family Circle (Elm Hill Park, Roxbury), Earth Challengers (The Joseph Lee School, Dorchester),  Time Enough (The Park School), and a portrait bust of labor organizer A. Philip Randolph.

Committed to figurative language in art, Cunningham has been profoundly interested in themes involving women and children in particular, and humanistic ideals in general. Her first large scale public work was Save the Children, 1972 (now destroyed), a composition in which a mother carries forward her uplifted child. Many of her private commissions have been portrait sculptures of youngsters.

Step on Board, her most demanding and historically significant commission, demonstrates her mastery at depicting the hale Harriet Tubman as a determined, visionary spirit inspiring men, women and children to overcome the perils on the road to freedom in the antebellum South.

Meta Warrick Fuller

Emancipation, 1913

Born in Philadelphia on June 9, 1877, Meta Vaux Warrick studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School for Industrial Arts (later the Philadelphia College of Art). In 18991   she continued her studies in Paris with Raphael Collins and at the Colarossi Academy. While in France, she met Dr. William E. B. Dubois who greatly admired her work. She also received encouragement from the noted French sculptor August Rodin whose studio in Mendon she visited.

After marrying Solomon Carter Fuller - America's first black psychiatrist - in 1909, Meta Vaux Warrick moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, where she lived and worked until her death.

W.E.B. Dubois urged Fuller to specialize in the depiction of African-Americans.  Fuller rejected this, yet she nonetheless stands at the forefront of sympathetic representation of black phenotypes in African American art early in the last century. Her thematic interests were wide, ranging from feminism (Equal Suffrage Medallion)  and issues of peace (Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War) to black history (The Jamestown Tableau, Emancipation) and African motifs (Ethiopia Awakening, Talking Skull). She executed allegorical, dance, theater and familial subjects as well.

Throughout her life, Fuller was a conscientious citizen active in civic, social and religious matters, as well as in cultural groups such as the Boston Art Club. Works by her were shown at the original Harriet Tubman House on Holyoke Street. Sue Bailey Thurman, one of the founders of the Museum of Afro-American History, was among her many friends.  Fuller died on March 18, 1968.

Explore the Park in Boston's South End