An Open Letter From Harriet Tubman Asking You to Keep Her Name Out Your Mouth

[sheshe2]

I was just chilling in the great cookout in the sky playing spades with Sojourner about to run a dime on Frederick Douglass and Richard Pryor when my Google Alert went off. (We have pretty good wi-fi up here.) Once again I heard someone down there mention my name, comparing themselves to me.

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Lil Marty (that’s what we call Martin Luther King, Jr. up here) warned me a long time ago that—if I’m not careful—they would whitewash me like they did him. But as it turns out, it wasn’t white people who were sullying my legacy, it was my own skinfolk!

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Earlier today, Kanye West explained his “slavery was choice” comments on Chicago radio station WGCI by saying: “When I hear anything about an entire powerful group of people being held captive for 400 years, it sounds like a choice to the spirit of Kanye West, which I think is aligned with the spirit of Harriet Tubman.”


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I know you said that you don’t get your information from books, you get it from your gut. Well, you need to tell your gut that when I was lying face down in the mud, hiding from fugitive slave hunters’ bloodhounds, the only choice my passengers on the Underground Railroad made was between liberty and death, or as I once said:

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Insinuating that anyone would choose the opposite of freedom is like saying that one chooses whether or not they should breathe. God gave us the right to freedom and no man chooses slavery. I know this is true because I have met slaves and I also know God personally.

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Read More:https://www.theroot.com/an-open-letter-from-harriet-tubman-asking-you-to-keep-h-1828699558

This is spot on...what a hoot/ Please read the rest.

Thank you Michael Harriot...

"I take boxing lessons with Muhammad Ali every Thursday (unless God wants a really intricate design in her braids)"

Whoa...Araminta Ross (slave name Harriett Tubman) just said that God is not only a woman, she is black.

Dayum, I love this!

[JoeOtterbein]

1. Thanks for this...

...snip 4 had me in tears.

Also, reminded me that many heroes surround us in history. Literally looking out my front window of the PA Township called New Freedom because it is directly across the Mason-Dixon Line from MD because it represented a "new freedom" for those escaping slavery.

And then remembering that the sound of dogs, and horses and men still hunted them down well over the state line. Hiding all the time in the mud until maybe some brave soul, like Araminta ushered them on to safety.

More tears...

[sheshe2]

2. Stop it.

Now you made me cry, Joe.

Article, done with humor emphasizes the horrors of their plight.

Thanks.

[Me.]

3. KR