This Harriet Tubman Quote That’s Going Viral Is Totally Fake

This Harriet Tubman Quote That’s Going Viral Is Totally Fake

Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the $US20 bill — which is awesome. So naturally, people on social media are celebrating with a famous Harriet Tubman quote: “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

The only problem? Tubman never said that.

W. Caleb McDaniel from Rice University has a blog post about all of the different respectable places that this quote has shown up over the years. Everyone from a New York Times columnist to Senator Cory Booker has helped spread the fake quote. But there’s no evidence that Tubman ever said it.

This Harriet Tubman Quote That’s Going Viral Is Totally Fake

Milton Sernett, author of the book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, traces the quote back to a 1970 essay on Tubman that likely pulled the quote from a fictionalised portrayal of Tubman’s life.

Making up quotes and attributing them to Tubman is nothing new, as McDaniel points out. In fact, early abolitionists were concocting quotes and embellishing stories about her even during her lifetime:

As Jean Humez shows in her book, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, this began with the very first abolitionists, who were responsible both for recording the illiterate Tubman’s own narratives and for crafting the first biographies. Those biographies are invaluable points of access into Tubman’s life and thought. But, Tubman scholars now agree, they also contained a variety of embellishments that served abolitionists’ purposes. Over time some of those embellishments (like the idea that Tubman took 19 trips back to the South and freed 300 people) became settled facts in collective memory, enshrined in children’s books and other scholarly texts as Tubman’s actual story receded from view.

The internet is just a photocopying machine for fake quotes. We’ve debunked quite a few of them here at Gizmodo, including quotes from Gandhi, Walt Disney and Albert Einstein, as well as plenty of others.

Fake quotes spread so quickly on the internet that they have even become believable enough to appear on US postage, as was the case with Maya Angelou. But as with so many things online, this Harriet Tubman quote is fake. And in so many cases of fake quotes, the internet is directly to blame for helping them spread far and wide.

Gizmodo’s Factually highlights fun facts, interesting photos and weird trivia.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.