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Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Artists Help Share Little Known Escapade Of Harriett Tubman
'Forward,' by Jacob Lawrence (1967), tempera on masonite panel. North Carolina Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina. © 2025 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society, NY. It's the sort of story America loves telling about itself. A story promoting the idea of American exceptionalism. American military exceptionalism. A daring midnight raid. A hero. Captives rescued from under the nose of a wicked enemy. Freedom prevailing over evil. But Americans don't know this story by and large. It's been buried. The hero and villains don't fit the nation's stereotypical casting of those characters. Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) and a crew of formerly enslaved freedom fighters are the heroes of the Combahee River Raid. The bad guys–the villains–wealthy white Southern landowners. Enslavers. Men. A Black woman getting over on a bunch of white men. Popular American history didn't like that role reversal and spit the story out. Now through October 5, 2025, the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC–about 30 miles north of where the Combahee River enters the Atlantic Ocean–revisits Tubman's escapade. The Combahee River Raid has never been explored this way. The museum exhibition features major works by some of America's leading artists including Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) and Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), artists who've honored Tubman through more than 100 years up to the present day. Paintings and sculptures from collections across the country are combined with striking environmental photographs of the Combahee River shot by Charleston native J Henry Fair (b. 1959). Depicted is a serpentine landscape where the heroic raid took place. The artworks and photos are displayed alongside historical items, archival images, video reenactments of the Raid, and multimedia testimonials by descendants of the enslaved people who liberated themselves. The presentation was inspired by Edda Fields-Black's 'COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.' The book was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History. Fields-Black is descended from a participant of the freedom raid. She teamed up with Fair, who provided photographs for her book, to pitch the museum about an exhibition related to the dramatic event. The Combahee River Raid 'Sunset reflected in the Combahee River,' photograph by J Henry Fair (2022). J Henry Fair In 1863, deep behind Confederate lines, Harriet Tubman led the largest and most successful slave rebellion in United States history. 756 enslaved people were liberated in six hours on that moonlit night in June. The total amounted to more than 10 times the number of enslaved people Tubman rescued during her decade of service as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. The Combahee River Raid was further remarkable because it was carried out by one of the earliest all-Black regiments of the Union army. Her group of spies, scouts, and other freedom fighters piloted three Union steamboats snaking up the lower Combahee River with Colonel James Montgomery of the Second South Carolina Volunteers and one battery of the Third Rhode Island Artillery. African Americans working in the rice fields on seven rice plantations along the Combahee heard the uninterrupted steam whistles of the US Army gunboats and ran to freedom. Toiling in South Carolina's rice fields–killing fields–was among the most brutal labor forced upon enslaved people in America. The morning after the Raid, 150 men who liberated themselves joined the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought for the freedom of others through the end of the Civil War. The Combahee River Raid was a monumental moment in American history. A moment mostly eliminated from retellings of the war, and Tubman's biography. 'A highly successful military raid led by a Black woman defied race and gender norms of the time as well as traditional military authority,' Sara Arnold, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Gibbes Museum of Art, told 'Additionally, the number of people successfully liberated in the raid powerfully demonstrated the profound yearning for freedom held by those in bondage–a narrative that was suppressed in the aftermath of the war by Southerners in power.' As is often the case, 'Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid' proves the art museum can be the best history museum too. 'Picturing Freedom' 'Harriet Tubman,' by Aaron Douglas (1931), oil on canvas. Bennett College, Greensboro, NC. © 2025 Heirs of Aaron Douglas. Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society, NY. In 2022, Fields-Black and Fair approached Gibbes Museum President and CEO Angela Mack about the concept of a museum exhibition related to the Tubman book they were working on. 'As an art museum we immediately recognized the importance of placing a visual history around this historic milestone‒to tell this story through art,' Mack said. 'This is an epic American story with a national legacy and universal impact.' The Museum invited Vanessa Thaxton-Ward, Director of Hampton University Museum, to guest curate the show. She hand-picked artworks from across the United States. 'I want this exhibition to show that Tubman was a whole person–she was more than the conductor of the Underground Railroad,' Thaxton-Ward said. 'She was a wife, she was a mother, she was a daughter. We also wanted to show how hard life was for enslaved laborers in the rice fields, especially the children. Many of these families were brought to the region because of their prior knowledge of the rice culture in West Africa.' After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, and started families. They created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity, celebrated today as one of Harriet Tubman's most significant legacies. The Gullah Geechee culture is marked by its unique language and living styles. Fields-Black's ancestors are from this area near Charleston and the Combahee River region; she is of Gullah Geechee descent. During the year-and-a-half that Fields-Black lived in the region researching her book, she walked the terrain where the historic river raid took place‒in the middle of the night under the light of the moon–retracing the freedom fighters' steps. The show carefully recreates the full journey of these brave soldiers and freedom seekers, including through a video re-enactment. One of the enslaved laborers who was freed during the raid will be portrayed in the video by the South Carolina-based actor, educator and author Ron Daise, known for his advocacy of and expertise in Gullah culture and language. Stephen Towns 'And I Shall Smite Thee,' 2018, by Stephen Towns (American, b. 1980). Natural and synthetic fiber, glass beads, metallic buttons, 46 x 58 inches. Private Collection. Gibbes Museum of Art 'Picturing Freedom' displays work from luminaries of American art history–William H. Johnson (1901-1970), and Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)–alongside contemporary artists. One of the more recent pieces is Kevin Pullen's (b. 1955) Can you break a Harriet (2024). The painting refers to the decade-plus effort to have Tubman honored on the U.S. $20 bill, replacing murderous tyrant and slaver Andrew Jackson. Stephen Towns (b. 1980) has a pair of Tubman quilted pictures in the exhibition, and a nearly unbelievable connection to the Gibbes. The South Carolina native formerly worked the front desk there part time more than 20 years ago. 'I was just trying to figure out how to get myself in the industry,' Towns told 'Being in South Carolina, there were very few opportunities and the Gibbes was the only art museum in the area.' Like most Americans, Towns only knew Tubman on the surface. She had a blurb in the World Book encyclopedia set his family owned growing up. He wanted to know more. 'Having read a couple of her biographies, she felt like a superhero to me,' Towns said. 'To think that someone has gone through as much as she went through, to have escaped being enslaved, and then to go back several times to get family members and friends, it's unheard of.' Learning more about Tubman's heroism, including the River Raid, inspired Towns to produce a series of Tubman quilts, two of which are in the show. One of those artworks, And I Shall Smith Thee (2018), recalls an episode from Tubman's life Towns found particularly powerful. 'When she was young, she was hit by this two pound weight that an enslaver had thrown at her, and from that period, she had these narcolepsy spells and dizzy spells where she could fall asleep at any time,' Towns explains. 'To realize that she had that throughout her life, these debilitating headaches, and she still did everything that she did through enslavement and also being a part of the women's movement, it's insane the accomplishments this woman has done.' Another aspect of Tubman's life most people don't realize. That American history glosses over. Tubman was disabled as a result of the childhood assault. She sustained a brain injury. In 1898, she underwent brain surgery in an attempt to relieve the pain. Without anesthesia. America doesn't like its heroes Black, female, or disabled. Tubman was all three. Illiterate on top of it all. Slaveholders, of course, withheld education from the enslaved, along with nearly everything else. Yet Tubman overcame it all. 'She was a young child, and she had gone into this general store, and she was protecting another enslaved person that was being abused,' Towns explained of the inspiration behind And I Shall Smite Thee . 'I used that moment as a moment of magical realism. I think for her, it kind of felt like magic, where she was in these fainting spells, and (had) these daydreams and these visions; that was her way of communicating to God to find different ways and routes of doing everything that she's done in her life. Even though that's a very painful moment, I use the power of that, and that's why you see her throwing a stone at the alligator.' And I shall smite thee. On Veterans Day, November 11, 2024, more than 100 years after her death, Tubman was posthumously commissioned as a Brigadier General by the Maryland National Guard. She was the first woman in the U.S. to lead an armed military operation during a war, yet she was never given official status by the military, and fought for decades for her military pension. More From Forbes Forbes International African American Museum Opens In Charleston, SC By Chadd Scott Forbes Stephen Towns Spotlights Workers At Bottom Of America's Economic Ladder By Chadd Scott
Wall Street Journal
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Fallout From the Iran Strikes
Editor's note: In this Future View, students discuss Trump's decision to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. This column will appear every other week throughout the summer. Next we'll ask: 'Have young people today lost faith in the idea of American exceptionalism? Why or why not?' Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words by July 21. The best responses will be published Tuesday night. Isolationism Isn't the Answer
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What US dollar weakness says about American exceptionalism
The dollar (DX=F, has had a 13-year run, but that era may be ending. Thierry Wizman, Macquarie Global FX and interest rates strategist, joins Market Catalysts to explain why the currency could be entering a period of weakness tied to rich valuations, policy uncertainty, and shifting global demand. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts here. I mean, of course it's natural for most assets to go up and down. Um, but I I don't know if we have yet seen this kind of a move in the dollar that implies what this perhaps implies about American exceptionalism. I'm curious your take on whether American exceptionalism has indeed really taken a hit or are there other aspects going on here? Thanks for having me, Julie. Look, I you know, it's interesting because the dollar, uh, the dollar strength, the US dollar strength was not really something that prevailed only in the back half of 2024. Uh, the dollar has been a strong currency for the past 13 years. It's been generally increasing or rallying or appreciating against other currencies both in nominal terms and real terms since 2001. So if you're going to talk about American exceptionalism as being somewhat equivalent to, uh, the appreciation of the US dollar, the strength of the US dollar, effectively we've had American exceptionalism for 13 years. And and if you point to the headlines of course in the history of these last 13 years, it it certainly does seem to support the idea that American exceptionalism has been around that long. We've had a lot of economic, small economic revolutions in this country that have, uh, produced productivity, uh, uh, produced growth, um, and it's been superlative effectively, uh, at least the way the market has interpreted relative to what has been going on in other countries over this 13-year period. So American exceptionalism has been going on for 13 years. Now the question is, are we at a point where after 13 years of this, uh, we are going to start to go in reverse. I think to some extent we are. One reason is that these periods of American exceptionalism that are matched by dollar strength don't usually last more than about a decade. So we're kind of overdue for a return. Uh, the other issue of course is that we've gone in these 13 years to a point in which US asset values and the value of the dollar has gotten very rich, objectively speaking, if you just look at these long-term charts. That's another reason. And of course with the a change of the administration and with the policy uncertainty that has come with it in the last, uh, few weeks and months, there now is a, you know, a compelling reason for asset allocators abroad to start, uh, winding down or dialing back their dollar exposure, both their US asset exposure and the attached dollar exposure. And I think those three things, you know, working together are what's going to, uh, cause the dollar at least to go into, I wouldn't call it a tail spin, but certainly a period of weakness here. So I don't think that we are going to get back to these highs that you alluded to earlier that prevailed in the very beginning of this year, uh, before this this down move. I think that's a thing of the past and I think that is the dollar is going to be weighed down by a few factors going forward, and it could last a few years. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side
Nearly everything that has gone badly, deeply, terribly wrong in America's present — if you're reading this, you probably don't need a list — can be found in America's past. Your favorite truism about the power of history may apply here; mine comes courtesy of Salon contributor Mike Lofgren: 'Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat famous quotations.' I don't mean that we are trapped in an inflexible pattern of endlessly repeating historical cycles, as in the more esoteric propositions of Vico and Nietzsche. ('Time is a flat circle,' as some lowlife says in the first season of 'True Detective,' moments before getting murdered by cops.) But too many of us, including a large proportion of liberals who ought to know better, are indeed trapped in the delusional one-way narrative of progress known as American exceptionalism, leading us to announce in horrified tones, with every new outrage of the Trump administration, that this is 'not who we are.' So it is with the Florida concentration camp for migrant detainees known as 'Alligator Alcatraz,' which was at first a gleeful MAGAsphere nickname and is now what this jury-rigged assemblage of cages under tents is actually called. To describe this evil little zone of exclusion as sadistic, despicable and insulting, or as a symptom of incipient or actual fascism, is accurate enough. But it's most definitely who 'we' are in 2025. If we claim that such a thing is 'un-American,' then we're the ones who haven't paid attention to history — and as profoundly ignorant about everything as Donald Trump and his supporters may be, they know that much. Just as America's penchant for religious mania and moral panic goes clear back to the Puritan settlers and the small-town schism of the Salem witch trials, the punitive, paranoid spirit behind Alligator Alcatraz — the desire to divide those who 'belong' to the imagined national community from those who do not — has deep roots in this nation's history. At the same time, the concentration camp is a modern global phenomenon with its own ironic history, which long precedes the Nazi death camps. It was a product of the industrial age, colonialism and newly racialized ideas of citizenship. If anything, Alligator Alcatraz is a classic example of the form, right down to its ugliness and cheapness, not to mention its explicit aim as a showcase for humiliation, suffering and dehumanization, but not quite for deliberate murder. The delusional narrative of progress mentioned above, in which democracy keeps on expanding, human rights gradually extend to everyone everywhere, and America draws ever closer to forging the 'more perfect union' promised by the Constitution, is understandably alluring, and almost irresistible. For many of us who grew up in the tumultuous decades between the civil rights movement and the Patriot Act, it served as a kind of civic religion: The 'arc of the moral universe' was bending in our direction, and all that. But that was always a subjective perception of history, not a universal law. It was widely shared by educated middle-class people infused with Enlightenment values, although not by all of them. It was true, of course, that the dizzying historical and technological changes of the 20th century had brought dramatic social progress. But it was a grievous historical error to assume that the gains made through passionate and painful struggle by racial justice movements, feminism, LGBTQ+ Pride, environmental crusaders and so on were natural, inevitable and universally accepted, or that no one beyond a handful of left-behind troglodytes seriously wanted to reverse them. Alligator Alcatraz, like nearly everything else about the second Trump regime, is a deliberate, overt mockery of the liberal narrative of progress. It's a manifestation of 'owning the libs' in physical, tangible and almost literal form. (So far, MAGA's secret police have not specifically targeted the regime's domestic opponents, but the threats get more explicit every day.) Terrorizing, incarcerating and deporting immigrants is an important regime goal in its own terms, of course, but the real target of terrorism — state terrorism included — is always the broader public. Liberal outrage, to some significant degree, is the point, as are a mounting sense of powerlessness and increasing anxiety about the rule of law and the constitutional order. In that sense, Alligator Alcatraz is also a postmodern phenomenon — a hamfisted ironic commentary on the failure of liberal democracy, and on how easy it was to undermine — as well as a site for the actual torment of actual human beings. As Andrea Pitzer, the author of 'One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,' observes in an MSNBC commentary, American history offers many pre-echoes of the Trumpian anti-immigrant crusade: Centuries of genocide and forcible removal against Native people 'set the stage for abuse of those not counted as citizens,' and slavery laws enabled human trafficking and created categories of human beings with no legal rights. Those historical crimes paved the way for a more recent example, the infamous concentration camps of the 1940s in which 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them native-born U.S. citizens, were interned for years after being dispossessed of their homes, their livelihoods and most of their property. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, among many neighbors and classmates whose parents and grandparents had survived those camps, and I don't remember the subject ever being mentioned. I'm not sure I knew internment had happened, or understood its scale, before I reached adulthood. The overt racism and grotesque unfairness of Japanese-American internment eventually provoked some degree of societal reckoning, if only years later. Historians have recently begun to pay attention to the less well-known internment of German Americans a few decades earlier, during World War I. Conditions in those camps were not especially harsh, and only a few thousand U.S. citizens were incarcerated. But anti-German propaganda campaigns, along with outlandish claims that hundreds of thousands of disloyal German Americans might rise up in revolt, left a lasting impact. German culture and the German language were virtually erased from American society almost overnight — sauerkraut was rebranded as 'Liberty cabbage,' seriously — and as historian Matthew Stibbe writes, the 'enemy alien hysteria' of the war years fed right into the Red Scare immediately afterward: [Q]uestioning the loyalty of individual citizens and non-citizens from particular ethnic backgrounds became standard practice for American agencies involved in domestic security after 1918 and the association of German- as well as Russian-born émigrés with left-wing subversion continued through to the late 1940s and beyond. There's no mistaking the bizarre historical irony at work here: German immigrants and their children faced systematic persecution and discrimination in the U.S. barely 15 years before Hitler took power in the Fatherland — and the long-tail effects included a decades-long crusade against socialists, anarchists and labor activists. If you want to go even deeper into WTF, consider this: Historian Caroline Elkins argues that the first systematic use of concentration camps against a civilian population came during the Boer War around 1900, when British authorities rounded up and interned thousands of Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa — in other words, the people known to us today as Afrikaners. written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Exactly how those events rebounded in later history is a complicated question, not a straightforward equation of cause and effect. Every self-defined human community winds up with a sense of historical grievance along the way, whether or not it makes sense to outsiders. That's one way of understanding where we are today, with a startlingly high proportion of white Americans — most of them descended from immigrants who faced hardship or persecution at some point — having forged a group identity of permanent resentment, pursuing an incoherent campaign of retribution against those they believe have cheated them, lied to them or tried to replace them. Alligator Alcatraz is the symbol of their crusade, and it could hardly be more American. It channels this country's long history of paranoia, xenophobia and systematic exclusion through the grotesque 20th-century innovation of the concentration camp, all of that repackaged as an aggressively stupid meme complete with AI-slop images, Etsy insta-merch and an almost lifelike salesbot in Kristi Noem. Most important of all, it inverts the liberal narrative of history, in which the misdeeds of the past offer us important lessons, mistakes to be confronted, repented and transcended on the path to something better. The intended lesson of Alligator Alcatraz is that there are no lessons in the past: There are no mistakes to correct, nothing to apologize for and nothing better to reach toward. There is only power and domination, and they should be celebrated. Plenty of Americans have believed that all along. The post Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side appeared first on
Mail & Guardian
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
Welcome to America
Anti-African: In Donald Trump's America, 32 out of Africa's 53 countries already face a US travel ban, or a threat of one. Photo: Supplied I've been neglecting my creativity column for a while, and here's why: my attention has been hijacked by the swift decay of my other country, my original country, and if you don't know me personally and haven't heard my accent, let me give you a hint to which that is: the one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for some, that used to, sometimes, inspire other nations around the world to greatness. Those days have ended rapidly, like a kiloton bomb dropped from a tall tower hitting the pavement in the middle of a city we once admired. Step by step with the frenetic speed of a cocaine polka, we have seen the remarkably intentional decline of American exceptionalism in the name of — what, exactly? Saving the nation from brown people? My fiancée, a Shona woman, says MAGA ought really to be MAWA — Make America White Again. Trumpism is not strictly a political project, in other words, but also, or perhaps primarily, a racial one. As evidence of this, note that the only people granted special refugee status under the Trump administration are our own group of 59 'persecuted' white farmers, some of whom are not even farmers, and none of whom have been persecuted under any realistic definition. One, Charl Kleinhaus, is the chief executive of a mining company. Many have surely made this move to get a US passport and a relocation bonus that includes furniture, housing, a pre-paid phone, and even groceries. Yes, groceries, which is a real benefit since their prices continue to rise in blessed America, even as Trump claims they are coming down. He also said on Liberation Day that the term groceries is old-fashioned yet beautiful. But that's another story. Meanwhile, legions of refugees from countries previously considered a priority such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Afghanistan are now being blocked, and Latino immigrants, including some in the US for years, are being deported to countries they're not even from. Trump, as we know, subjected our own president to the indignity of being shown a series of clips of Julius Malema singing Shoot the Boer and other irrelevant provocations, to prove there is rampant white genocide in our republic, although in the end it will be Trump who may be humiliated when some of our friends return home, proverbial tail between legs, begging for forgiveness. Meanwhile, this same administration has instituted travel bans against 12 countries with brown-skinned majorities, as if this will stop the acceleration of its non-white population. Seven of these 12 are in Africa. Do the maths. An additional three dozen have now been threatened with similar bans if they don't shape up by mid-August. There are too many in this group to conclude what they are doing wrong in common, but here's a hint: 25 are in Africa. This means that a total of 32 of our continent's 53 countries are either being stopped from visiting the Land of the Free, or under threat of it. Africa has only an eighth of the world's population, yet two-thirds of the ban. Clearly, we are very bad hombres. This affects me personally, with my Zimbabwean fiancée on the brink of being forbidden to visit me, never mind what this short-term block might mean for her long-term green card prospects. Otherwise, no great loss, perhaps. Who would want to go to America now? Only someone who wants to experience what it's like during the rise of a fascist dictatorship, which admittedly could be educational. I only came to South Africa in 1998, so I missed our own version by a few years. In a perverse way, living under Trump's rising autocracy might at least be entertaining. South Africa is not on the exclusion list for now. But keep your fingers crossed. We are strictening our visa policy and, by September, visas at the border will be no longer. America may see the home affairs department's move, though applying to everyone around the world, as targeted at it alone, as it does with everything. And then, Marco Rubio's department of state, viewing this as a personal affront, might just vindictively add South Africa to the list of egregious offenders. Ironically, the illusory white genocide keeps us safer, because Washington must hold the doors open to more aspiring Boer-Americans. Since nationality trumps (no pun intended) race in such things, even if for purely administrative reasons, as philosophically and politically abhorrent as the white genocide story is, the situation is positive in a way. Me personally? I can go back and forth without a visa either way, being a dual citizen. Once, my presidents were Trump and Jacob Zuma. Now Trump, for one, is back again. And so I will use this status to infiltrate via my family's beachhead in Long Island, and send back reports. If my adopted country evades a future travel ban to keep the door open for MAWA's bigger needs, let's perhaps be grateful for the functional benefit of letting these apostates through the gates. As long as the narrative of white South Africans needing political asylum holds, as reprehensible a story as it tells, this sort of reverse fronting policy leaves us off of the list of pariahs for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, given what's going on, we might prefer, spiritually, to be on such a list. With America busy nudging us toward World War III, maybe we'd rather be publicly identified as personae non gratae in that culture. Given that our own future may, shockingly, be tied to the success of our erstwhile refugees across the shining sea, I was thinking it might be useful for us to find out where things stand with them. Where are they now? What's become of them since landing in Atlanta? Why did the government choose one of the blackest cities in the country for their entry? Are they tilling the fields of rural Georgia, or living in Athens row houses or Savannah penthouses? Are they blending in, or sticking out like sore veld transplants? Are they driving tractors now, or Teslas? Is their preferred trauma therapy ploughing peanuts in Tifton or playing golf in Augusta? How many others might join them later? Have any already come back home, disillusioned? Do their LinkedIn profiles now label them as global agricultural executives? Was it all just a media opportunity, or will this, alongside the travel ban, become long-term US policy? There are so many questions. Admittedly, I have a personal interest here as well. My fiancée is short steps away from being naturalised as a member of Mzansi. Keeping South Africa off Trump's naughty list might just save our marriage. Look out for my next column from the land of the free, to find out more. Michael Lee is the Mail & Guardian's US correspondent currently based in New York.
