Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial

Harriet Tubman, born into slavery in Maryland around 1822, escaped in 1849 through the Underground Railroad and then spent ten years returning to Maryland at great personal risk to guide scores of friends and family members to freedom after first settling in Philadelphia and then Canada. Determined to end slavery, she later served the Union Army as a scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she continued campaigning for equal rights for women and African-Americans and carried out humanitarian work for the sick, homeless, and disabled of all races, helping lead to the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged there. She died in 1913 and was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn with semi-military honors. In Harlem, a larger-than-life bronze sculpture at Saint Nicholas Avenue, West 122nd Street, and Frederick Douglass Boulevard presents her as an unstoppable locomotive, with the roots of slavery pulled up in her wake, stylized portraits of anonymous Underground Railroad passengers in her skirt, and bronze tiles around a granite base showing events in her life and traditional quilting patterns.

New York, New York · United States