Strong Enough to Fight: Harriet Tubman vs. The Myth of the Lost Cause

Abstract

Black creators who tell Harriet Tubman’s story engage in an ongoing rhetorical battle over historical memory with regard to slavery and the Civil War. This essay examines the challenges Tubman’s story poses to a Lost Cause narrative that took root in the nineteenth-century and manifests in the work of celebrated children’s author Robert Lawson. Reading Ann Petry’s YA biography Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955), Jacob Lawrence’s picture book Harriet and the Promised Land (1968), and Kasi Lemmons’ film Harriet (2019) together, and within the context of Lawson’s award-winning They Were Strong and Good (1940) and his historical primer Watchwords of Liberty: A Pageantry of American Quotations (1943) offers an opportunity to assess the rhetorical firepower of creative work about a historical figure who continues to fascinate people of all ages. Such reading also underscores the extent to which the apartheid in and of children’s literature limits the imaginations of critics, thereby hindering efforts to promote social justice.