“
In mid-October, with a “half-fare ticket” in her hand, Tubman took passage from Philadelphia to New York on a late-night Camden & South Amboy train. When the conductor ordered her to the smoking car, she refused. She explained that she was working for the government and was entitled to ride wherever she liked. “Come, hustle out of here! We don't carry niggers for half-fare,” the conductor yelled at her. He physically struggled with her, but Tubman's legendary strength apparently outmatched him. Clinging tenaciously to some part of the interior of the compartment, she resisted his efforts to forcibly remove her from the train car. He called upon two other men to help; they pried her fingers loose from the car, then wrenched her arm and broke it. She was then thrown violently into the smoking car, further injuring her shoulder and possibly breaking several of her ribs. No one on the train came to her aid; in fact several passengers shouted epithets and encouraged the conductor to throw her off the train. She told the conductor “he was a copperhead scoundrel, for which he choked her... She told him she didn't thank anybody to call her colored person—She would be called black or Negro—she was as proud of being a black woman as he was of being white.”
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND, EXCERPT...
BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND: HARRIET TUBMAN, PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN HERO, by Kate Clifford Larson (One World Books, Random House, NY:2004), p.231-232
“For African Americans both in the North and in the South, bigotry and injustice lingered. In Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York, for instance, African Americans faced daily indignities and resistance to their claims in transportation, education, entertainment, and employment. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, for instance, were among many African Americans forcibly removed from trains and streetcars, because of the color of their skin, and so was Harriet Tubman. After the war, many such incidents occurred throughout the North; though slavery had ended, rampant discrimination against African Americans persisted.
“
In mid-October, with a “half-fare ticket” in her hand, Tubman took passage from Philadelphia to New York on a late-night Camden & South Amboy train. When the conductor ordered her to the smoking car, she refused. She explained that she was working for the government and was entitled to ride wherever she liked. “Come, hustle out of here! We don't carry niggers for half-fare,” the conductor yelled at her. He physically struggled with her, but Tubman's legendary strength apparently outmatched him. Clinging tenaciously to some part of the interior of the compartment, she resisted his efforts to forcibly remove her from the train car. He called upon two other men to help; they pried her fingers loose from the car, then wrenched her arm and broke it. She was then thrown violently into the smoking car, further injuring her shoulder and possibly breaking several of her ribs. No one on the train came to her aid; in fact several passengers shouted epithets and encouraged the conductor to throw her off the train. She told the conductor “he was a copperhead scoundrel, for which he choked her... She told him she didn't thank anybody to call her colored person—She would be called black or Negro—she was as proud of being a black woman as he was of being white.”
“
In mid-October, with a “half-fare ticket” in her hand, Tubman took passage from Philadelphia to New York on a late-night Camden & South Amboy train. When the conductor ordered her to the smoking car, she refused. She explained that she was working for the government and was entitled to ride wherever she liked. “Come, hustle out of here! We don't carry niggers for half-fare,” the conductor yelled at her. He physically struggled with her, but Tubman's legendary strength apparently outmatched him. Clinging tenaciously to some part of the interior of the compartment, she resisted his efforts to forcibly remove her from the train car. He called upon two other men to help; they pried her fingers loose from the car, then wrenched her arm and broke it. She was then thrown violently into the smoking car, further injuring her shoulder and possibly breaking several of her ribs. No one on the train came to her aid; in fact several passengers shouted epithets and encouraged the conductor to throw her off the train. She told the conductor “he was a copperhead scoundrel, for which he choked her... She told him she didn't thank anybody to call her colored person—She would be called black or Negro—she was as proud of being a black woman as he was of being white.”