Harriet Tubman's Legacy Hasn't Always Been Celebrated. Here's What Changed

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.
In April 2016, Wyatt Houston Day was expecting a visit from a collector who had made an appointment so that the Swann Galleries’ expert on printed and Manuscript African Americana could take a look at the cartes-de-viste album he owned. The collector had picked this album up at a sidewalk sale at the Puck Building in New York over 30 years before. Some goods left in storage were being sold off, and he bought the collection of photos as a lark. Day was used to disappointment, but when he began to thumb through the album, he recalled: “I almost fell out of my chair!”
This souvenir album contained 44 19th-century daguerreotypes—men and women, blacks and whites, including a familiar image of the intrepid Underground Railroad conductor, Harriet Tubman. Indeed, this image adorned the cover of not just my own 2004 biography, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, but also Jean Humez’s book, Harriet Tubman: the Life and Life Stories, which appeared the same year. Our studies, and one by Kate Clifford Larson, were published simultaneously in 2004, nearly 60 years after Earl Conrad’s 1942 biography.

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