Author: Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black

Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She has written numerous scholarly studies on the trans-national history of West African rice farmers. Fields-Black is also a former consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture’s permanent exhibit “Rice Fields of the Lowcountry.” Fields-Blacks’s latest book is tentatively titled Combee’: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, the first full-length study of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War activities. Fields-Black is also executive producer and librettist of Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice, the first full symphonic work about enslavement composed by three-time Emmy Award winning classical music composer, John Wineglass.

‘Harriet’ and the Combahee River Raid

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman’s work on the Underground Railroad. But there are still many things about Harriet Tubman’s extraordinary Civil War service that Americans do not know—including being the first woman in U.S. history to lead men into battle, in what became known as the Combahee River Raid.

In 1974, Tubman’s incredible victories and sacrifices to free the most oppressed inspired a group of Black feminists to build coalitions and engage globally in political activism to free Black women from capitalism, racism and patriarchy: the Combahee River Collective.