“Songs of Freedom, Journeying the Underground Railroad” performed by Linda Harris, vocalist and narrator and David B. Cole, guitar. Honoring the code songs used on the clandestine journey along the Underground Railroad by Harriet Tubman and the Freedom Seekers in 1849.

NOTE from Linda Harris, Director of Events and Programs at the Harriet Tubman Museum & Educational Center in Cambridge, MD

By 1850 over 100,000 enslaved men and women traveled the Underground Railroad to freedom. The paths went south to Mexico, north to Canada, and west to Utah. Harriet Tubman, born in 1822, embarked upon her first Journey to Freedom in 1849 and traveled a clandestine route from Dorchester County, Maryland, to Philadelphia. The route was an extensive network of people, codes, and safe houses. Harriet Tubman completed 13 successful journeys on the Underground Railroad and led 70 men, women, and children to freedom above the Mason-Dixon Line.

In 2020, I walked with seven women in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, traveling 158 miles from the Brodess Plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland, to Philadelphia. Since then, walks have included the civil rights paths from Selma to Montgomery, retracing the tragic and brutal end to Emmett Till’s life from Money, Mississippi, along the Tallahatchie River, through the battlefields Tubman traveled along the Combahee River in South Carolina during the Civil War, the path of the Christiana Rioters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and other paths along the Underground Railroad in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York.

Free – all are welcome!