Aaron Gustafson's Blog, page 8

Lizzo is all about self-acceptance and empowerment

I can���t remember exactly when I discovered Lizzo, but I do remember how refreshing I found her work. A self-professed ���big girl with a cute face,��� Lizzo is incredibly empowered and comfortable in her own skin. Having struggled with my own body image issues���including dealing with a decent amount of body shaming���I���ve found her ability to find beauty in everyone���including herself���inspirational.

Lizzo was born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit and grew up in Texas. Growing up, she played flute, listened to gospel, fronted an experimental rock band, and rapped alongside friends in a group called the ���Cornrow Clique.��� After bouncing around between a few different rap crews and R&B groups in Texas with little success, Lizzo decided to relocate to Minneapolis to focus on music full time. A friend offered her a place to stay and she began performing with an electro soul-pop duo, Lizzo & the Larva Ink, and an all-female rap and R&B group, The Chalice.

Sometimes things happen in unexpected ways. Such was the case when, in the midst of a bout of writer���s block, she discovered Lazerbeak���s album Lava Bangers. Inspired, she began writing lyrics over his music and decided to tweet at him, saying she���d love to work with him. Fast forward a tad and she released Lizzobangers with Lazerbeak on beats and Bon Iver���s Justin Vernon producing (no word if she paid him in Mike���s Hard Strawberry Lemonade though).

In her solo career, especially, Lizzo has spent a good deal of time at the intersection of gender, race, and politics. Skipping the obvious societal disadvantages of being black, people dismissed her for being a female rapper and people ignored her because she���s not skinny. Rather than letting it hold her back, however, Lizzo seems to harness that oppression as fuel. It seems to have become a source of her power and inspiration for her work. Consider her raw testament that introduces ���My Skin���:

Learning to love yourself and like learning to love your body is like a whole journey that I feel like every person, but more specifically, women, have to go through so I feel like doing this is a good way to kinda break through and kinda seal the last chapter of the ���learning to love��� and just loving.

The song is, quite literally, about learning to love the color of her skin:

I woke up in this, I woke up in this

In my skin

I can���t wash it away, so you can���t take it from me

My brown skin

I hope Oscar feels the same way as he grows up. I hope I can help him realize how beautiful he is; he certainly hears it a lot from me and Kelly, but he���s only three. I���m sure he���ll struggle with what it means to be the black child of two white parents, but I wish for him to never doubt his own worth, especially based on the color of his skin.

In an interview with Teen Vogue, Lizzo recalled ���When I was in high school, I was a big girl with a cute face. So dudes liked me secretly, but they didn���t like me publicly. I never had a boyfriend because they didn���t want to claim me.��� Now that she���s a ���star,��� she doesn���t feel like much has changed. ���So now in this industry, I���m a big girl with a cute face and some cute music and I���m still being liked secretly and not claimed publicly.���

That said, Lizzo does have a strong following and a lot of supporters. We appreciate her self-assured attitude. She exudes confidence and it���s infectious. ���It���s like, ���She���s comfortable in her own skin. Can I just put on her music and sing along and pretend I���m like that for a second?��� That���s the story I get from a lot of girls,��� Lizzo told Billboard. ���They say, ���Thank you for making this body-positive music. Thank you for being a body-positive performer, and thank you for being you.��� That helps me be comfortable. It���s a journey but I���m getting there.���

On ���Fitness,��� she celebrates her curves in her patently cheeky way:

Think about how I���m gonna feel when I step up on the catwalk

Think about how I���m gonna feel when I got that ass that don���t stop

That ass that don���t stop, that ass don���t stop

And think about how I���m gonna feel when I take it all off

But I don���t do this for you

That last line cuts right through, though, and clearly demonstrates how empowered she truly is: ���I don���t do this for you.���

Not all of Lizzo���s music is about self-acceptance though; it���s also about seeing beauty and value in everyone. I particularly love this verse from ���Boys���:

I like big boys, itty bitty boys

Mississippi boys, inner city boys

I like the pretty boys with the bow tie

Get your nails did, let it blow dry

I like a big beard, I like a clean face

I don���t discriminate, come and get a taste

From the playboys to the gay boys

Go and slay, boys, you my fave boys

Unsurprisingly, Lizzo���s also a champion for other ���big��� girls. Her dance crew, for instance������The Big Grrrls������are all considered ���plus size��� by American standards. That would cause most folks in the U.S. to write them off as a novelty act, a joke��� but damn they can dance. She once told Vogue ���I don���t really care about having the number-one album; I care about the influence. ��� I���d rather have 100K big girls on the field at the Super Bowl dancing, showing the world all we can do.���

From everything I���ve read, Lizzo still struggles���like we all do���with self esteem, but her ability to push through that and be a bold example for how we all should feel about our bodies just blows me away. She���s at once positive, playful, and powerful and I can���t help but feel inspired.

Nina Simone ���said it��� when others couldn���t

Nina Simone���s performance of ���My Baby Just Cares for Me��� has long been one of my favorite songs. Her hands slink across the piano keys as her unmistakable voice seems to dance in, out and, around the melody they produce. It���s a joy to listen to and still gives me those this-is-amazing shivers that only the best music does. I don���t recall my first introduction to Nina Simone, but I remember how striking her voice was. And she used that voice to say the things others couldn���t.

Nina Simone began her professional career in a piano bar in Atlantic City in the mid 1950s and charted her first single���an arrangement of George Gershwin���s ���I Loves You, Porgy������in 1958. As her popularity grew, she began drawing larger, and whiter, audiences.

In 1964, she played the renown Carnegie Hall to a mostly white audience and hit them with an ice cold bucket of confrontation entitled ���Mississippi Goddam.��� The song was a reaction���reportedly penned in under an hour���to two horrific events in 1963: the assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young black girls.

Yes you lied to me all these years

You told me to wash and clean my ears

And talk real fine just like a lady

And you���d stop calling me Sister Sadie



Oh but this whole country is full of lies

You���re all gonna die and die like flies

I don���t trust you any more

You keep on saying ���Go slow!���

���Go slow!���



But that���s just the trouble

���Do it slow���

Desegregation

���Do it slow���

Mass participation

���Do it slow���

Reunification

���Do it slow���

Do things gradually

���Do it slow���

But bring more tragedy

���Do it slow���

Why don���t you see it

Why don���t you feel it

I don���t know

I don���t know

The song is incendiary and the response was��� unsurprising. Radio stations in the South banned it and celebrated smashing the singles (of course, I assume they had to pay for them, so at least there���s that). White people just weren���t (and really still aren���t) used to having to confront their legacy.

Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, later recalled ���If you look at all the suffering black folks went through, not one black man would dare say ���Mississippi Goddam.��� We all wanted to say it. She said it.���

And ���Mississippi Goddam��� wasn���t the only protest song Nina Simone would pen. During that same concert series, which was immortalized on Nina Simone in Concert, she also recorded ���Old Jim Crow��� about the Jim Crow laws prevalent throughout the South. In addition to performing songs as acts of protest, she was also active at civil rights meetings and events like the Selma to Montgomery marches. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr, however, Nina Simone was not against armed combat in the struggle for civil rights.

Simone went on to pen many more protest and political songs throughout her career, but the other big highlight for me���and another source of those chills���is ���Young, Gifted and Black��� from her album Black Gold. This one has more of a gospel feel to it, it���s powerful and uplifting and it became an anthem of the Black Power movement.

Young, gifted and black

We must begin to tell our young

There���s a world waiting for

This is a quest that���s just begun

Truly the struggle she wrote about in 1969 is still (sadly) ongoing, but she seemed to see a light in the distance. She saw that period as a time to focus on the future, the youth, and on all of the potential that had been locked away with the subjugation of black people. She wanted people to recognize their gifts, their talents and the power.

Oh but my joy of today

Is that we can all be proud to say

To be young, gifted and black

Is where it���s at

For many, Nina Simone was the musical voice of the civil rights era. She wasn���t afraid to say what others wouldn���t��� or couldn���t. Her career in America doubtless suffered because of that, but she did it anyway and I can���t help but respect that.

Bayard Rustin advocated for marginalized people everywhere

During Black History Month, there is, understandably, a great deal of focus placed on the folks who risked their lives (and, in some cases, lost them) in the fight for the civil rights of their fellow Black Americans. Growing up, however, I never heard about Bayard Rustin and his incredible legacy of standing up for marginalized people, both here in the U.S. and abroad.

Bayard Rustin was born in 1912 and raised by his maternal grandparents in West Chester, PA. He was greatly influenced by his grandmother, a Quaker. As a relatively well-off member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she frequently hosted NAACP leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson in her home. Given his upbringing in this environment, it���s unsurprising that he found a way to wed the pacifism of Quakers with a strong interest in joining the Civil Rights movement.

Rustin���s first political action���a protest against poor cafeteria food���got him expelled from Wilberforce University. Bit by the bug of activism, he completed a training course offered by a Quaker social justice organization and moved to Harlem. While in New York, he became involved in the defense of the nine black ���Scottsboro Boys��� accused of raping two white women in Alabama.

In 1941, Rustin joined A. Philip Randolph and A. J. Muste in the Oval Office to inform President Roosevelt that they would be organizing a march on Washington if he did not desegregate the military and provide fair working opportunities for the black community. Randolph cancelled the march when Roosevelt signed the Fair Employment Act, despite Rustin���s reservations.

Following that, Rustin went to California. Following Japan���s attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had ordered the imprisonment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. During their incarceration, Rustin worked and organized for the protection of these Americans��� property.

In 1942, Rustin boarded a bus from Louisville, KY to Nashville, TN and sat in the second row in protest of the segregation of interstate travel and the American South���s Jim Crow laws. For this non-violent transgression, he was arrested outside of Nashville and beaten by police. When asked about it later, he recalled:

As I was going by the second seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring necktie I was wearing and pulled it, whereupon its mother said, ���Don���t touch a n*****.��� If I go and sit quietly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so innocent of race relations that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down quietly that it���s going to end up saying, ���They like it back there, I���ve never seen anybody protest against it.��� I owe it to that child, not only to my own dignity, I owe it to that child, that it should be educated to know that blacks do not want to sit in the back, and therefore I should get arrested, letting all these white people in the bus know that I do not accept that.

This was yet another clear example of Rustin���s commitment to the social justice pacifism of the Quakers.

That same year, Rustin became involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a pacifist organization heavily influenced by the writings of Mohandas Gandhi and Krishnalal Shridharani. In 1947, he and CORE co-founder George Houser organized the first of the Freedom Rides to test Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia���s ban on racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin was arrested and served 27 days in a chain gang in North Carolina for his participation.

In 1948, Rustin travelled to India to learn more about non-violent civil resistance. During this period, he also met with leaders of independence movements from Ghana and Nigeria and, in 1951, founded the Committee to Support South African Resistance.

Back in the States, Rustin became an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. on Gandhian tactics. King was in the process of planning the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rustin encouraged him to turn it into a non-violent protest rather than relying on guns for protection. Later, Rustin and King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but Rustin was forced out by other leaders in the community who were concerned with his ���morals��� (Rustin was gay).

Not dissuaded by his ouster, Rustin organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Weeks before the march, renown jackass���and segregationist���Strom Thurmond ���filled eight pages of the Congressional Record with detailed denunciations of Rustin as a draft-dodging communist homosexual and a convicted ���sex pervert.������ (Rustin was arrested in Pasadena for lewd conduct���consensual relations with another man in a parked car���in 1953.) Thurmond even tried to paint Rustin���s relationship with King as a homosexual one, which both men denied. Rustin, nevertheless, organized the hell out of the March, despite the fact that many in the civil rights movement didn���t want him associated with it.

Up until his death in 1987, Bayard Rustin fought���non-violently for the most part, though he did become a little more apt to condone violence in his later years���for anyone he saw as oppressed. Oddly, however, he never saw himself as a member of the struggle for gay rights. That said, Rustin saw a great deal of alignment between the struggle for black equality and the gay rights movement.

In 2013, Barack Obama posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bayard Rustin. He called Bayard ���an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all��� who ���fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad.��� And he���s right: Bayard Rustin was an extraordinary man whose influence on the civil rights movement was profound, both in its impact and in its pacifism.

You can read more about Bayard Rustin at rustin.org.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman was the glue for the civil rights movement

A few weeks back, Marcy Sutton shared a slide deck by Tanya Reilly with me. The talk was ���Being Glue��� and it discussed the incredibly important (and shamefully undervalued) role of being the ���glue��� that holds a team together and makes them successful. That talk was concerned with technical teams, but this role is universal to any organization, collaboration, or project. In many ways, Anna Arnold Hedgeman was glue for the civil rights movement and I don���t think she gets enough credit for it.

During the Great Depression, Anna worked with New York City���s Department of Welfare, investigating racial issues. Instead of merely investigating and reporting, however, she pushed for the appointment of people from under-represented communities to civil service positions. She used her influence to bolster the visibility of minority populations and helped create employment opportunities for them at the same time. Textbook glue.

In the 1940s, she was recruited to lead a national council to lobby for the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). The story of the FEPC is a whole thing, but Anna���s role was connecting the federal effort to improve employment options for blacks and other minorities with numerous local FEPC Councils that were working to bring that same fairness to local and state governments. Sadly, the FEPC wasn���t successful in its ultimate goal, but it did move the needle by helping blacks enter ���industries, firms, and occupations that otherwise might have remained closed to them.��� And Anna was the glue.

In the 1950s, she became the first black woman to be appointed to the mayoral cabinet in New York City. Her role? Liaison between Harlem and City Hall. Glue!

In the 1960s, she helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (yes, that March on Washington). She reportedly recruited 40,000 protestant churchmen���all by herself!���and the march is credited with helping pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not one to rest on her laurels, Anna co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a direct reaction to failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of that very same Civil Rights Act. Glue!

I could go on, but I think that���s probably enough for you to recognize how many amazing things this one woman accomplished in her lifetime. Throughout her careers as a civil rights leader, politician, writer, and educator, Anna Arnold Hedgeman found ways to bring people together for a common cause. She was the glue for several civil rights movements and her efforts have had a lasting impact on this country. And yet she rarely gets the credit she is most assuredly due.

Never underestimate the value of someone who is the glue for your team. Thank them for their work and give them the respect they deserve.

Chuck D challenges me to confront myself

Few people in hip-hop command as much respect as Chuck D. But unlike many who���ve achieved his level of critical and commercial success, Chuck D has never stopped fighting for others. And he���s challenged me to do my part.

Growing up, I vividly remember my first introduction to Chuck D in the guise of Public Enemy. I was thumbing through the bins at my local record shop and was confronted by the bold cover of Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy���s third record. Given my musical taste at the time, I was probably on the hunt for a Pet Shop Boys��� record or something, so its unsurprising Fear didn���t come home with me that day.

My musical tastes did broaden a bit over the next few years, however, and I began to gravitate toward more overtly political punk and rap. And when I did, Public Enemy was there for me. Growing up a middle class white boy in suburban Orlando, their music was��� challenging to say the least. Not only was it aggressive, but the content challenged my worldview.

Unlike many people who reacted negatively when confronted with the themes of Public Enemy���s records���black radicalism, white supremacy, institutional racism���I felt driven to reflect on my own existence, my own privilege. In many ways, I didn���t feel like Chuck D���s lyrics were confronting me, but rather challenging me to confront myself.

As an adult, I experienced Chuck D in a new way as one of the hosts of Unfiltered on Air America Radio. I found a lot of solace in his wisdom and politics���and those of his co-hosts Lizz Winstead and Rachel Maddow���at the start of George W. Bush���s second term.1 And, as I���d come to expect by that point, he continued to challenge my comfortable life and made me question what I was doing to help others less fortunate than myself.

Though many years have passed since I first discovered Chuck D, I feel like he���s shaped both my life and my politics. He���s encouraged me to be more aware and take a greater���which is to say active���interest in the lives and well-being of my fellow humans. And, of course, he���s also provided a killer soundtrack to boot.

Thank you Chuck!

Which, and I feel shocked to say this, I almost look back on with fondness in light of the U.S.���s current leadership.��↩

He invented the search engine, but you don���t know his name

Have you ever heard the name Alan Emtage? Probably not. He didn���t start a nearly trillion-dollar company. He isn���t digging massive tunnels under cities. His pet project isn���t putting people on Mars. But he wrote the first search engine, way back in 1990. The thing is, he doesn���t brag about this accomplishment.

Hailing from Barbados, Alan Emtage was working on his Masters Degree at the School of Computer Science at McGill University in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While attending McGill, he was also working as a systems administrator for his department. As part of this work, he became the go-to person to help faculty and fellow students locate open source software on the early Internet. To automate things a bit, he built a rudimentary database that would keep an index of all of the files spread across the network. Still, he was the gatekeeper of this data.

And so Alan, along with his colleagues Bill Heelan and Mike Parker, created a user interface that allowed users to search the database directly. They dubbed this search engine ���Archie��� (���archive��� without the ���v���). That was the first true internet search engine. To put this in context, it wasn���t until the following year that Brewster Kahle���s Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), Mark McCahill���s Gopher, and Tim Berners-Lee���s World Wide Web even appeared. Those, of course, enabled people to more easily browse and access information spread across the slightly less vast Internet of the day.1

Funnily enough, later search engines paid homage to Archie. One Gopher search engine was called ���Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives��� or ���Veronica��� and another was called ���Jonzy���s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display��� or ���Jughead��� (both, a nod to Archie comics). Two years later, the first search engine of the World Wide Web was dubbed ALIWEB for ���Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB���.

In the time since Archie, Alan has done a lot of thinking about search engines and where things are headed, especially when it comes to bias and censorship in search results. He also recognizes the dangers posed my ���smart��� algorithms that factor your browsing and search history into the results they display. He astutely observes that these systems can limit your exposure to differences of thought and opinion, very similarly to what we see happening in social media echo chambers.

Alan Emtage is a pretty fascinating guy. And what I really admire about him is his humility. Despite actually being the creator of the first search engine, he���s not out there trying to boost his own image or cash in on this accomplishment. In fact, I haven���t even seen a humblebrag from him.

At a time in the tech industry with a lot of posturing, gloating, and one-upmanship, Alan���s humility shines.

You can read Alan���s memories from this period in a post on Medium.��↩

Kimberly Bryant is tackling tech monocultures head-on

A modern revolutionary, Kimberly Bryant left her lucrative biotech job to address the lack of diversity in the tech industry by starting Black Girls Code. It all started when her daughter Kia���an avid gamer���expressed interest in learning to program at the age of 10.

Kia was attending a summer camp for game development at Stamford at the time. She was one of only a handful of girls and she was the only person of color in the program. On top of feeling isolated, Kia and the other girls were not getting nearly the same amount of attention and direction as the boys.

Between being perplexed by the lack of diversity and support in Kia���s summer camp and hearing the constant cop-out of ���there just aren���t enough qualified women ready to take on tech jobs,��� Kimberly decided to tackle the ���pipeline��� issue head-on. After all, little had changed since Kimberly had grown up a self-professed nerd in the 1970s when it came to role models for women in tech, let alone women of color. She was determined to change that for her daughter���s generation and founded Black Girls Code.

Her program offers after school and summer camp programs in programming, robotics, web design, and mobile app development to young women aged 7���17. And many of their programs are free. Those that aren���t offer needs-based scholarships. All of this is in an effort to train a million girls by 2040. It���s an ambitious, but incredibly worthy goal!

What I really like about Kimberly Bryant���s approach is that it isn���t just about tackling the underrepresentation of women, especially women of color, in tech. It���s also about helping young women engage with the platforms they use daily���phones, tablets, etc.���as creators, not just consumers. And ultimately it���s about creating career opportunities for these young women, helping to reduce the staggeringly high percentage of black women who live below the poverty line in America: 26% according to 2014 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. It���s also worth noting that the same study found that that same data set identified the nation���s highest poverty rates (46%) are among black families headed by single black women, like Kimberly.

Kimberly Bryant���s work is incredibly important and I am inspired by her willingness to risk her own comfort for the betterment of both current and future generations of young black women growing up in this country (and beyond).

Thomas Jennings put his money on the line

I hadn���t heard about Thomas Jennings until recently, but his story is a pretty impressive one. Did you know he invented dry cleaning? Yeah, a white man is often credited with the invention of modern dry cleaning, but Thomas Jennings invented the ���dry scouring��� technique that gave birth to modern dry cleaning. He also successfully patented the idea, becoming the first black man to be awarded a patent for his invention. In 1821, a full 42 years before the Emancipation Proclamation!

As you���d expect given the time, many whites tried to keep Thomas Jennings from receiving his patent. But he was a free man and under patent law at that time, he was eligible to patent his invention.1

He used the proceeds earned from his patent (and from his tailoring business) to purchase freedom for his wife and several of his children, who were still bound to a slaveholder as ���indentured servants��� and ���apprentices��� under New York���s gradual abolition law of 1799. Not only that, he continued to use his earnings to support the abolitionist movement, voting rights, and civil rights for blacks throughout the United States.

When his daughter Elizabeth was forcibly removed from a ���whites only��� streetcar in New York City in 1854, he helped her bring a lawsuit against the streetcar operator (it was all private companies back then). Elizabeth won the case in 1855, and her father helped found the Legal Rights Association to push for minority rights and challenge racial discrimination. Her case was also the catalyst that helped desegregate public transit throughout New York.

I truly appreciate Thomas Jennings��� tenacity and commitment to helping others, especially his willingness to put his own money on the line to do so. I also appreciate the irony of using an establishment of white privilege (patents) to undermine the very foundations of white supremacy.

The patent laws changed in 1858, granting slaveholders ownership over the intellectual products of their slaves. Strangely, in 1861, the Confederate States of America granted slaves the right to hold patents. They did that nearly a decade before the United States returned that right.��↩

Aretha commanded respect

We lost an amazing voice and an amazing human being when Aretha Franklin died last year. Countless articles have been written about the positive impact she���s had on the struggles for both Civil Rights and Native American rights. Apart from her amazing voice and presence, the thing I will remember most about Aretha is her purse.

If you���re wondering what the hell I���m talking about, watch some of her live performances. Aretha would walk out on stage, purse in hand, and set it on the piano. Apart from the fact that she had some truly spectacular handbags, you might wonder what the significance was. Well, it was a revolutionary act rooted in the historical treatment of black performers in America.

You see, black performers were often robbed of income by shyster venue owners and booking agents. At the end of a gig, their promised payment wouldn���t materialize. If paid before the show, the money might mysteriously disappear from their dressing room. It���s appalling and happened with incredible frequency.

With a keen awareness of this reality, Aretha Franklin required payment up front for a gig. She put the money in her purse and she carried it on stage with her and placed it where she could keep an eye on it. Early on, it was the most practical way to protect herself from getting robbed of her hard-earned money. But later on, it became at once both an act of remembrance and of defiance. It said You (whites, mostly) have mistreated us and robbed us. I know that and you know that. You cannot and will not take advantage of me. I will not be a victim. Feel free to throw a ���fuck you��� in there too, though I���m not sure Aretha would approve of the language.

Aretha was an incredible performer. She remained committed to civil rights and equal treatment for all peoples, right up until her death. She demanded (and deserved) respect, but she gave it as well. She���s a truly unforgettable woman.

Harriet really was a spy

While the history of slavery in America was covered in my schooling, that education was largely superficial. I do have vivid memories of learning about Harriet Tubman and the ���underground railroad��� that helped smuggle slaves out of the slave-owning Confederacy into freedom (such as it was) in the United States and Canada during the Civil War. What I didn���t know is that there is so much more to Harriet Tubman. She was the first woman to lead a U.S. military expedition and she was a spy (and recruiter) for the Union army!

During the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward, whose house was a stop on the underground railroad, ran a spy ring that recruited former slaves. The key to the success of this endeavor was the to white Confederates. They didn���t see them and they didn���t even consider that they might be intelligent enough to be working against them.

Their invisibility didn���t mean this work was without risk though. These former slaves were not legally free; they were still considered fugitives under the law. Moreover, Tubman was a well-known abolitionist, so her travels into enemy territory were exceptionally risky.

Harriet Tubman was incredibly brave, leading raids on rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina, taking out Confederate infrastructure and freeing slaves along the way. She recruited many of them to join the Union army too. She also ventured into Confederate territory on her own, gathering information from local slaves about Confederate plans, troop movements, and where mines had been placed in the rivers.

Harriet Tubman was a badass!

Sadly���but unsurprisingly���she never got paid for her work as a spy during her lifetime. In 2003, however, then-Senator Hillary Clinton did issue a payment to Harriet Tubman���s estate as a way to posthumously repay her for her efforts and bravery (and the pension she never received).

After the war, Harriet Tubman took up the cause of women���s suffrage alongside Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland. Sadly, the role of black women in the suffragist movement has also been undermined and downplayed. We need to remember and celebrate their contributions too.

For more about Harriet Tubman���s wartime history, check out the book Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent and listen to ���The Raid��� from Uncivil.

I don���t think I���m alone in feeling like my education around my country���s history of slavery, the Civil War, and our prejudice against black people, is woefully inadequate. In order to confront the way our society systemically divides, degrades, and destroys black lives, we need to take a long hard look at where this oppression began. If we don���t recognize and own the atrocities of our past (and present), we can���t change them. Education is key. We need to do better.