This is part of the Brilliance Remastered Breathing is Brilliant reprise of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind’s 2014 Black Feminist Breathing Chorus with new essays about institutional power and Black feminist brilliance.

“My people are free,” was a bold statement for Harriet Tubman to make in the midst of US chattel slavery, when the Fugitive Slave Act was in full effect and she herself was the most wanted fugitive slave in the land.

However it was exactly that visionary certainty that guided Harriet Tubman to lead hundreds of enslaved people across constructed borders and to lead the largest successful uprising of enslaved people at the Combahee River.

Harriet Tubman’s work to dismantle the institution of slavery in the United States resounds forever.  What people may not know as much about is the counter-institution building work Tubman engaged in throughout her life.  Tubman was a strategic genius and she knew that the freedom her people required alternative structures during and after the dominance of slavery as an economic form in the United States.

In addition to being one of the major architects and conductors of the famed Underground Railroad, which was its own robust, decentralized and adaptable institution committed to the consistent undermining of the system of slavery, Tubman practiced micro-institutional development as a major freedom practice.   For example, immediately after more than 700 enslaved people from the Gullah region near the Combahee River stole themselves free and helped burn down 32 plantation buildings and flood the rice fields that were funding the confederacy, they needed something to build in the place of what they had necessarily destroyed.  In the case of the newly free who identified as men, military service was a primary option, and many of those men joined the Union Army and led to the Union victory in the Civil War.  Harriet Tubman helped trained those people and also trained the women who had freed themselves and their families to start their own businesses (especially laundry and pie-making businesses, which she had experience in personally) to create new income streams for themselves and their families during and after the war.

Later, when Harriet Tubman moved to New York State long-term with her family she created a home for Black elders who didn’t have access to care in the existing systems to face old age with dignity and care.  I hope that one day Harriet Tubman is as celebrated for what she built and nurtured as what she escaped and helped destroy.   Among many lessons (for example Harriet Tubman’s standard for white collaboration was very high—she only collaborated with white people who were willing to literally risk their lives for the freedom of Black people—and Abraham Lincoln didn’t make the cut), Harriet Tubman’s life has much to teach those of us who are mobilized by the clarity of our critique to dismantle the interlocking systems of oppression (#combaheetaughtus).  What exactly do we need to be building as we dismantle that which harms our communities? How can we use the expertise we have gained under oppression to train ourselves and others to nurture their freedom?

What is at least one thing you have learned by surviving in oppressive circumstances that you could teach other people in your community?  

Towards this freedom-building approach we are offering a guided meditation inspired by Harriet Tubman’s acknowledgement that our people are already free, we just have to build a world that honors and acknowledges that on every scale.

Of course this is what we work through all the time at Brilliance Remastered, so if you are not yet part of the Brilliance Remastered Brain Trust sign up to be first to learn about our online and in person events here.

And if you want to get involved with the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive (the love based institution we are building out of generations of queer black brilliance right now) check us out at mobilehomecoming.org.

Loving you with every breath, because breathing is brilliant. 

Always,

Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs