The official trailer for Harriet, a movie about the life of runaway slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, was released on Tuesday morning by Focus Features. The film is currently in post-production and will be released in theaters on November 1st, 2019.
I can’t wait. If the movie is as good as the trailer it will be a powerful film and it is fitting as Harriet Tubman was an inspiring and powerful figure in the abolition movement in the 1850s and 60s.
Tubman (1822-1913), born Araminta Ross, was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped to Philadelphia in 1849.
“I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other,” she recalled.
Tubman later returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Given the nickname Moses, for the next eight years, Tubman made 19 trips leading at least 300 slaves to freedom utilizing the Underground Railroad. She said as a conductor on the Underground Railroad that she “never had a train go off the track and she never lost a passenger.”
Slaveholders eventually posted a $44,000 reward for her capture, but she was never caught. “I can’t die but once,” she stated, a saying that would later become her motto.
In 1850, after the Fugitive Slave Act passed, she led fugitive slaves further north into Canada. In 1858, she met abolitionist John Brown and helped recruit supporters for his raid on Haper’s Ferry in 1859.
Tubman worked for the Union Army during the Civil War, starting out as a cook and then a nurse she eventually became an armed scout and spy. During the war, she became the first woman to lead an armed expedition that later freed 700 slaves.
Those who knew her said that Tubman’s strength came from her faith in God as deliverer and protector of the weak.
“I said to de Lord, ‘I’m goin’ to hold steady on to you, an’ I know you’ll see me through,'” she remembered.
Tubman said that she always expected the Lord to lead her and He always did.
Later in life, she advocated for women’s suffrage until shortly before her death in 1913.
Harriet stars Cynthia Erivo (Bad Times at the El Royale, Widows, Step) who plays Tubman, as well as, Leslie Odom Jr. (Murder on the Orient Express, Red Tails, Person of Interest), Joe Alwyn (The Favourite), Jennifer Nettles (Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, Underground), and Clarke Peters (The Wire). Kasi Lemmons is the director and produced by Debra Martin Chase and Daniela Taplin Lundberg.
Watch the trailer below:
