'Heroic Souls': The Activist Memory of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth

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My project is the first comprehensive study of the memory of 19th century African American femaleabolitionists. In placing activist memories of these antislavery campaigners during the 20th and 21stcenturies at the centre of a wider debate about the use of historical figures in the black freedomstruggle, I show how traditional notions of black female leadership have shaped these representationsof black women. I focus on Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, the only two black female abolitioniststo achieve iconic status in public memory. I show how writers, artists and activists shaped their imagesto both echo and challenge 20th and 21st century ideas on race and resistance, mainly regarding nonviolentprotest and white male leadership as the dominant modes of anti-racist activism. Using aninterdisciplinary methodology that draws on texts, sculptures, murals and artwork, I chart the evolutionof Tubman and Truth's representations from the late 19th century to today. After chapter one's analysisof how both women self-consciously shaped the memories of their abolitionism in the Reconstructionperiod, I examine how their images evolved over key periods of black activism: the anti-lynchingmovement of the 1890s-1930s, the classic civil rights era of the 1940-60s, Black Power and post-civilrights activism in the 1960-90s and the Obama era and Black Lives Matter from 2000 on. Bydemonstrating how and why artists and campaigners adapted Tubman and Truth's memory to servethe needs of each period, I explore more broadly the ways that 20th and 21st century activists used theantislavery movement as a microcosm of the black freedom struggle. This project evolved from my MAdissertation on the memory of Tubman, wherein I recovered many unexamined representations ofTubman in children's literature. My PhD extends this research to cover 100 years of representations,with a focus on activist memory, added depictions of Tubman and numerous little-known portrayals ofTruth.