哈丽叶-塔布曼河奇袭 - 5 月 23 日至 10 月 5 日开放
The world premiere museum exhibition Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid 打开 May 23 through October 5 at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston.
In 1863 behind Confederate lines, Harriet Tubman led the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the United States. The visionary multimedia museum exhibition brings to life the daring freedom fighters led by Tubman on that fateful moonlit night in 1863, when 756 enslaved people liberated themselves in six hours ‒ more than ten times the number of enslaved people Tubman rescued during the ten years of the Underground Railroad. The Combahee River Raid was remarkable because it was carried out by one of the earliest all-Black regiments of the Union army.
This untold story has never been explored this way, featuring major works by some of America’s leading artists honoring Harriet Tubman throughout more than 100 years of artmaking in America.
These paintings and sculptures from important collections across the country are combined with stunning environmental photographs by J Henry Fair of the Combahee River serpentine landscape where the heroic raid took place, alongside historical items and archival images.
在一起 this powerful grouping will immerse viewers in the dangers enslaved people faced in this treacherous terrain, forced to work in South Carolina’s deadly tidal rice swamps.
Now finally recognized as the most successful Union military operation of the Civil War, this uprising was orchestrated and guided by Harriet Tubman. Yet until now, there is little or no mention of her Combahee River Raid in most history textbooks.
- This museum show is inspired by the award-winning book by Dr. Edda Fields-Black (historian at Carnegie Mellon University). The Pulitzer organization just announced this week that her relevatory book won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History (her book is published by Oxford University Press).
This new museum show carefully recreates the full journey of these brave soldiers and freedom seekers. Video reenactments of the River Raid, and multimedia testimonials by descendants of the enslaved people who liberated themselves, will be featured in this exhibition. These enslaved laborers are finally given names and stories, to permanently inscribe them into the historical record.
On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman led the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the United States. Her group of spies, scouts, and other freedom fighters piloted three Union steamboats as they snaked up the lower Combahee River with Colonel James Montgomery, the Second South Carolina Volunteers (300 Black soldiers), 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.
756 enslaved people liberated themselves in six hours, more than ten times the number of enslaved people Tubman rescued during the ten years of the Underground Railroad.
The morning after the raid, 150 men who liberated themselves in the Raid 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.
The many biographies, children’s books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory–Beaufort, South Carolina–to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.
