Today is Harriet Tubman Day.
Now I had never heard of Harriet Tubman until her story appeared in a time-travel series I was watching. After watching the show, I looked her up. She was AMAZING!
An opponent of slavery, and a political activist, she herself was born into slavery in America almost two hundred years ago. She escaped and then rescued others – making some 13 missions to rescue slaves. She also served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army in the American civil war. And before her death on this day in 1913, she campaigned for the right for women to vote. She really was an extraordinary woman. A film about her life came out last year.
There’s another extraordinary black American woman I’d never heard of until her story was told in the film, Hidden Figures. Katherine Goble Johnson died a couple of weeks ago. Her astonishing mathematical skills were critical to the success of the first US manned space flights, and many more space missions thereafter.
Harriet Tubman and Katherine Goble Johnson are just two black American women who are only now beginning to enter public consciousness through the medium of film. My education certainly never brought their contributions to light before that.
I grew up in a time when there weren’t that many female role models, let alone Black female role models. I barely read about women who went to university. Female doctors, politicians, and business women were few and far between. As for slavery busting activists and NASA mathematicians… these women were unheard of!
Our world has been shaped by all sorts of contributions from all sorts of different types of people. So many of the innovations that make up our modern world came into being from surprising places.
As a Muslim I have made myself familiar with the contributions to the great body of global knowledge that Muslims have made, whilst recognising that knowledge builds on the shoulders of giants.
I reckon it’s important to recognise the great contributions made by a whole host of varied humans that give us our world today. Maybe if we can recognise that we have a shared human history, we’ll feel we have a stronger shared human future.
Broadcast 16th March 2020 on BBC Radio 2
Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0865wc5