Political Quotes

“I rise to celebrate the life of Harriet Tubman and the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park. Harriet Tubman was an American hero who championed freedom and was most famously known as a leader of the Underground Railroad whose roots were on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Harriet Tubman was an iconic figure in our Nation's history for whom liberty and freedom were not just ideas but were God-given rights she fought tirelessly and at great personal peril to spread to others in bondage. The woman who is known to us as Harriet Tubman was born in approximately 1822 in Dorchester County, MD, and given the name Araminta ``Minty'' Ross. Born into slavery, she spent nearly 30 years of her life toiling for various families on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Even as a young, enslaved girl, she demonstrated impressive mental and physical strength. One of her jobs was to set and check muskrat traps in the swamps of the Blackwater River during blazing hot summers and freezing cold winters. Even though Harriet was slight in physical stature, she frequently worked with the men in the forest cutting timber and carrying logs. It was in this work setting, where both free and enslaved people worked together harvesting timber, that she first heard stories about what life was like for free Blacks in Northern States. As a teenaged slave, one of her first acts of defiance was sticking up for an enslaved boy who was being harassed by a shopkeeper.…”