Join us for the third annual Western PA Book Read as we read and discuss Dèyby Edwidge Danticat.

This year, we will distribute copies of Dèy to individuals and organizations beginning August 26, 2026. Between September 2026 and February 2027, participants will read the book, and in early March 2027, partner organizations will offer their locations for group discussions.

The group discussions will be held between March 1 and March 13, 2027. Participants who want to join the group discussion will sign up and attend one of the ten discussions in the locations closest to them.

The Western PA Book Read is made possible through a collaboration with Steel Smiling and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, with support from The Pittsburgh Foundation. 
 

REGISTER HERE

Dèy tells the vivid, timely story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence one sunny Florida day.

“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami, after she hears the terrifying sounds of gunfire while shopping for her daughter’s first-ever cell phone; she takes shelter in a restaurant called Oasis, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners, each praying to their respective gods.

Once she’s safely home, Magnolia hides the fact that she was at the mall shooting from everyone close to her. But given her life back, she begins to see it all clearly, and as if for the first time—what the extraordinary bond she has with her daughter, Zoë, really means to her, and what Zoë may feel in return; what the nearly broken relationship she has with her partner, Harrison, has cost her, despite his love for her and their daughter; why her mentally troubled mother—whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself—might be so ghost-haunted; what the source of her father’s pain, and his reason for seeking solace in the arms of a mistress, really is. As Magnolia struggles through the labyrinth of her past, she must also come to terms with the losses sustained that traumatic day, losses that we all bear witness to all too often in our troubling times.

Can love, can family, protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart, one’s soul? Which side will win out for Magnolia—and where does she really belong? Pulled between these questions, and her beloved, high-stakes choices and worlds—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is one of the most compelling characters that Danticat has ever created—a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: shimmering, flitting between choices, drawn to the light yet emitting her own.

Taking its title from the Creole word for mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance of sharing grief and leave-taking, but also of the ties of family—takeout dinners around a table, fresh dirt on a plant’s roots in the garden, swimming together in the azure seas. As Magnolia questions whether all has not yet been lost, Dèy celebrates the complexity of life in a brave and striking novel that is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with a signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).

No shame in my name—only truth and legacy.

I believe everyone carries a story worth telling—one powerful enough to connect us, heal us, and leave a mark on this world. As the editor of PittsburghUrbanMedia.com, I’ve spent my career uplifting voices in our communities. But now, after decades of telling everyone else’s stories, I’m finally ready to tell my own.

This is the journey of “Missy,” a little Black girl born into an interracial family that fractured before she ever took her first steps. A child given away by one side of her family, and raised with love, structure, and grit by the other. A girl who grew up poor in Denver, running through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, dreaming bigger than the world around her believed possible.

It is the story of a biracial daughter who refused to shrink. A girl who wrestled with identity, silence, and abandonment—and rose to become an award-winning journalist, a producer, a media leader, and a woman who learned to claim her power without apology.

It’s a story about resilience, self-discovery, and the simple, sacred act of refusing to be erased.

And now, as I look back over six decades of living, I understand something I never understood before:

I will always be that little girl named Missy—running down 32nd and Marion Street, gathering smiles from elders, protected by angels I could not yet see.

Everything I survived, everything I achieved, everything I am… it all began with her.

This is The Memoirs of Missy—the story of a little Black girl who rose from the margins with courage, grit, and grace… who found her voice, claimed her lineage, and discovered there was never anything to be ashamed of.

Just truth.
Just resilience.
Just destiny.

This is Memoirs of Missy—a testament to rising up, speaking out, and letting the truth set you free.

Purchase on Amazon Click Here

It is not difficult to identify acts of overt racism in America today. They are blaring and clear violations of civil and human rights. Unfortunately, as a nation, our attention is so focused on mitigating overt racism that we ignore micro-aggressions against people of color -- acts of racism that are equally as damaging but harder to identify because they operate within the law. NEGOTIATING A HISTORICALLY WHITE UNIVERSITY WHILE BLACK unpacks many of the difficulties awaiting a person of color in academic spaces, allowing the reader to experience the types of micro-aggressions that subtly maintain a “Whites only” culture within academia. Jack L. Daniel gives a face and a voice, sometimes via humor, other times via heartbreak, to the African American experience in historically White institutions of higher education. It is an honest, self-reflective autoethnographic narrative that is thought-provoking and timely, challenging African American students to take responsibility for their own pursuit of excellence while at the same time challenging faculty and administration to play their roles in ensuring equal education access and success. by Stacy Johnson

Purchase on Amazon Click Here

At the pinnacle of motorsports, a humble young man from Stevenage, England, has risen to become the greatest Formula One driver of all time. Lewis Hamilton’s journey from remote-controlled car hobbyist to seven-time world champion, knight of the realm, and global superstar is the stuff of sporting legend.

This authoritative biography follows Hamilton’s path from his early days karting on local tracks to the glitz and pressure of the Formula One circuit. Along the way, we witness Hamilton’s single-minded determination to reach the top, even as he challenged racial barriers and opposition at every turn. His triumph over adversity is all the more inspiring given Hamilton’s pioneering role in making motorsports accessible to marginalized communities.

Beyond his unparalleled on-track exploits—leveling the record books held by the legendary Michael Schumacher—Hamilton has used his platform to advocate for social justice, environmental sustainability, and diversity. He has become a worldwide tastemaker of art, fashion, and lifestyle, while also emerging as a voice of moral clarity. Hamilton has leveraged his fame to push Formula One and global sports to be a force for positive influence while inspiring a new generation of athletes and artists to pursue their dreams.

As Hamilton nears the twilight of his racing career, this thoroughly researched book examines his lasting legacy. His impact extends far beyond just his championship trophies. Sir Lewis culminates with Hamilton at the wheel of the iconic Ferrari Team, where he continues to chase world titles and set new standards, further validating his greatness. 

Michael E. Sawyer is an author and professor of African American Literature and Culture and the director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. His lifelong interest in Formula One and global culture merge to offer a definitive account of the life and legacy of one of the greatest athletes of our era. 

Copies of Sir Lewis are for sale at White Whale Bookstore.

Joe William Trotter, Jr., is Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice, Director and Founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE), and author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.

Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Covering an incredible range of cities from the North to the South, the East to the West, Joe William Trotter, Jr., traces the growth of Black cities and political power from the preindustrial era to the present.

Joe William Trotter, Jr., is Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice, Director and Founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE), and author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.

In BUILDING THE BLACK CITY, you use the term “Black City” as a way of describing a unique type of urban environment and experience. Why was it important for you to name it, and how do you differentiate the “Black City” from a city with Black people living in it?

I define the Black City as an area that reflects the impact of a predominantly Black community in an urban environment, but the Black City is by no means exclusively Black in spatial terms nor was it built only by Black people. It included substantial collaboration with whites and included whites and other ethnic/racial groups within its geographical parameters. Moreover, ideologically, it also embraced the notion that the Black City would be more inclusive and democratic than the predominantly white, racially segregated portion of the community. Just as the US was known historically as a white nation with a variety of groups including people of African descent living within it, the Black city is not construed as only Black.

Much of the material written about the Black experience in early America is centered on rural areas, which had the largest populations of enslaved people. What do we miss when we neglect to study Black lives in urban communities?

By neglecting the Black urban experience at the founding of the nation and earlier, we are left with the erroneous impression that Black people only became significantly urban people during the 20th century Great Migration, which is not true. African Americans participated in the building of the predominantly white city from the outset of the nation's history. They also undertook the work of building their own urban communities at the same time. A focus on the early urban history of Black people is important for shedding light on the Black city-building process as a long-term historical phenomenon.

There has been a Black urban working class since this country’s inception. How has it shaped America’s cities?

In my previous book, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, I emphasize how unfree enslaved African American labor and later underpaid free Black labor played a major role in building the American city across all regions of the country, North, South, and West. In early America, enslaved African American workers provided the bulk of the workforce in the building of majority and near-majority Black cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston. In the urban Upper South, Black workers helped to build Baltimore, Richmond, and Washington, DC, including the White House and the US Capitol building. And in the urban Northeast, enslaved and later free people of color left their mark on the construction of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Similarly, under the impact of the Great Migration, they helped to shape the building of cities in the urban midwest, including Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, to name a few. In the case of Chicago, it was a Black man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who became known as the first non-Indigenous American to settle and help build Chicago. Although their numbers were much smaller in the urban West until the mid to late 20th century, African Americans also helped to influence the city-building process in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

Throughout the book, no matter the city, two institutions that bonded the Black community were the church and the school. Can you speak to the obstacles that were erected by whites to prevent religious and educational development in Black communities?

It was not just the church and the school that stood out in the building of the Black City. It was most often the church, fraternal orders and mutual benefit societies, the school, and diverse entrepreneurial developments that took center stage in the building of Black cities. Each of these entities faced enormous obstacles gaining a foothold in the city but Black people found ways to circumvent white resistance and built their own institutions. Indeed, the independent Black church emerged at the forefront of these infrastructure building efforts. Take the pioneering African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), for example. In the 1790s, when it broke ranks with the white church and set up an independent body, it faced tremendous white resistance. It took another 20 years of legal struggles and a major court case before the white church relinquished control over the finances, buildings, and liturgy of the Black congregation.

The book goes into great detail highlighting the entrepreneurs, pastors, teachers, and community leaders who helped create the Black urban experience. Why was it important to you to give a face to individual people, and who were some you found the most interesting?

There is a long tradition of historical writings on the African American experience that emphasize the doings of the most well-educated and wealthier members of the African American community (particularly doctors, lawyers, and educators), especially since there was an even longer tradition of anti-Black historical studies that accent notions of Black intellectual inferiority, "laziness," and people with a poor work ethic. My book aims to supplement portraits of energetic and creative Black professionals, intellectuals, and business people with a more detailed focus on the poor and working-class dimensions of the Black city-building process. The role of ordinary everyday people (general laborers and household workers as well as skilled craftsmen and women) receives substantial attention in this book. They not only contributed to community-building as clients and dues-paying members of a variety of Black businesses and professional services, but they often contributed their labor to the actual work of constructing Black churches, schools, and fraternal organizations. Pioneering Black leaders often emerged out of the soil of working-class Black life. Richard Allen, founder of the independent Black church movement with Absalom, was a butcher, woodcutter, shoemaker, and janitor, while Andrew Bryan, the founder of the Afro-Baptist church in Savannah, was an enslaved worker on a nearby plantation. For her part, when the enslaved household worker and field hand Harriet Tubman escaped from a Maryland plantation and moved to Philadelphia, she became a wage-earning domestic laborer in the homes of the city’s white elite.

A common theme in the Black urban experience is white terrorism, two infamous examples being the Tulsa race riots and the New York City draft riots during the Civil War. How central are those two events and their aftermath to the broader story of this book? 

The Tulsa and New York City riots are emblematic of the violent resistance that African Americans faced nationwide in their efforts to construct the Black city, an independent movement that aimed to transform what one historian has described as "segregation," a demeaning experience, into "congregation," a symbol of empowerment. Across America, over several centuries, Building the Black City shows how Black people constructed their own institutional infrastructure against the ongoing backdrop of racial violence and hostility—in the urban South, North, West, and Midwest, most notably the destructive Atlanta Riot of 1906 and the "Red Summer" Chicago Riot of 1919, among many others.

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Source: UC Press Blog

The ABC News journalist strides onto the United Nations Plaza in New York and, in his sonorous voice, details the escalating U.S. missile crisis with the Soviet Union. It is Oct. 28, 1962, and the nuclear weapons standoff has America — and the world — on edge.

It is a tense moment in history, one that overshadows the other history being made that day. It is the story of pioneering broadcaster Mal Goode, who had just become the first African American to report on national television, shattering a racial barrier and creating a pathway for thousands of Black journalists to follow.

“Mal Goode Reporting: The Life and Work of a Black Broadcast Trailblazer,” by Pitt Teaching Professor and Assistant Dean Liann Tsoukas, and her colleague Professor Rob Ruck uses archives, family interviews, corporate memos and more to chronicle Goode’s personal story and, with it, the story of a changing America.

Almost 30 years after Goode’s breakthrough during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ruck, a historian of sports, was working on a documentary about baseball in the Negro Leagues when he met the retired journalist.

Goode’s roots in Homestead and as a Pittsburgh radio announcer meant he was closely connected to many Black ballplayers, including those who integrated the sport, such as Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente. In fact, it was Robinson, leveraging his own influence, who got Goode an audition with ABC News.

[Learn more about Goode and the book at NPR]

In listening to Goode (A&S ’32) tell of his beginnings in the rural valleys of Virginia and his rise to the heights of corporate broadcasting, it was soon apparent, says Ruck, that “his story was about much more than baseball.” Years after Goode’s death in September 1995, at the suggestion of retired Pitt history professor Richard Smethurst, Goode’s family approached Ruck to write a biography and help bring that story to a new generation.

Tsoukas joined him, using her expertise in social justice and Black American narratives to do just that, to showcase Goode’s “pathbreaking presence ... and reveal American histories yet to be told.”

Goode was ambitious from an early age. He did well at Homestead High School, came to Pitt in 1927, which he paid for by working nights in the steel mills, and soon joined the Black Greek-letter fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha.

He became a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier and local radio, and because he used his voice to challenge segregation and discrimination, he was known to some as “Mouth Almighty.”

In the summer of 1962, Goode got the call to join ABC News.

Overcome with emotion, Goode told the ABC executives, “I am the grandson of slaves. I never thought I’d see this day.”

Source: Pitt

by Ervin Dyer

 Dr. Ralph Proctor, local author and CCAC professor of Ethnic and Diversity Studies, recently released his latest book, “Song of the Hill,” a memoir and tribute to the special place and culture known in Pittsburgh as “The Hill.”

The book is a moving and intimate portrait of a community that has long been the focus of authors and playwrights. Yet, according to Proctor, the area has been widely misrepresented because stories of the Hill District have featured either famous entertainers and jazz musicians or negative depictions of a downtrodden community.

“Many writers who never lived there give an erroneous picture of the Hill. This area was not about drugs, poverty and unhappy people. It was a thriving middle-class community. This book is my personal account of what life was like for an average citizen.”

“Song of the Hill” is Proctor’s recollection of his experiences between 1938 and 1960 as a youngster and through adulthood. The book also touches on the forces that destroyed this remarkable community. The author tells his story through the eyes of real people from his past, depicting everyday life, family, church, food and culture during a time period of both innocence and shameful injustice.

“I grew up in this comforting, loving neighborhood surrounded by good, hardworking people. While in the sheltering arms on the Hill, we never experienced racism. But urban renewal, white flight and racism tore down a culture, destroying lives, ambitions and dreams,” said Proctor.

Available through most online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, “Song of the Hill” is the third in a four-book series. Ralph Proctor’s previous titles include “Racial Discrimination against Black Teachers and Black Professionals in the Pittsburgh Public School System: 1834–1973” and “Voices from the Firing Line,” a personal account of the civil rights movement.

In this long-overdue celebration of Black women’s resilience and unheralded strength, the revered, trailblazing White House correspondent reflects on “The Year That Changed Everything”—2020—and African-American women’s unprecedented role in upholding democracy.

“I am keenly aware that everyone and everything has a story,” April D. Ryan acknowledges. “Also, I have always marveled at Black women and how we work to move mountains and are never really thanked or recognized.” In Black Women Will Save the World, she melds these two truths, creating an inspiring and heart-tugging portrait of one of the momentous years in America, 2020—when America elected its first Black woman Vice President—and celebrates the tenacity, power, and impact of Black women across America.

From the beginning of the nation to today, Black women have transformed their pain into progress and have been at the frontlines of the nation’s political, social, and economic struggles. These “Sheroes” as Ryan calls them, include current political leaders such as Maxine Waters, Valerie Jarrett, and Kamala Harris; LaTosha Brown, and other activists. Combining profiles and in-depth interviews with these influential movers and shakers and many more, Ryan explores the challenges Black women endure, and how the lessons they’ve learned can help us shape our own stories. Ryan also chronicles her personal journey from working-class Baltimore to the elite echelons of journalism and speaks out about the hurdles she faced in becoming one of the most well-connected members of the Washington press corps—while raising two daughters as a single mother in the aftermath of a messy divorce.

It is time for everyone to acknowledge Black women’s unrivaled contributions to America. Yet our democracy remains in peril, and their work is far from done. Black Women Will Save the World presents a vital kaleidoscopic look at women of different ages and from diverse backgrounds who devote their lives to making the world a better place—even if that means stepping out of their “place.”

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Kardea Brown, the breakout star of Food Network’s hit show Delicious Miss Brown celebrates the Gullah/Geechee culinary traditions of her family in this spectacular cookbook featuring 125 original mouthwatering recipes and gorgeous four-color photos.

The Way Home brings a taste of the Lowcountry South home, offering flavor-packed dishes everyone will enjoy such as:

She-Crab Soup

Seafood Potato Salad

Crabcake Benedict

Smoked Pasta Salad

Savory Bread Pudding

Peach Dump Cake

Blood Orange Salmon

Smothered Chicken

Low Country Spaghetti

Sweet Potato Cheesecake

Kardea shares her multi-generational “passed down” recipes and innovative takes on Gullah classics with home cooks everywhere. “Gullah” and “GeeChee” refer to a distinct group of African Americans living in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia who have preserved much of their West African language, culture, and cuisine. The Way Home is an unabashed love letter to her family’s roots, packed with dishes that combine West African herbs, spices, and grains with traditional Southern cooking. “Gullah people laid the foundation for Southern cooking. Before farm-to-table was a fad, it was what Gullah people did,” Kardea explains. “I want to show the world that soul food is not monolithic. It’s so much more than fried chicken and vegetables cooked in pork. It’s seasonal, fresh and delicious! ”

Flavoring her recipes with cherished family anecdotes, memories, and helpful tips, The Way Home is a perfect blend of the modern and the traditional. Kardea honors her proud heritage and shows off her own signature class and sass. The result is a marvelous, big-hearted collection of recipes and stories that will nourish you, body and soul.

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 The award-winning journalist and co-host of CBS Saturday Morning tells the candid, and deeply personal story of her mother’s abandonment and how the search for answers forced her to reckon with her own identity and the secrets that shaped her family for five decades.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Michelle traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Michelle’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

As she charts her personal journey, Michelle looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation’s own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets—secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.

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Watch the Interview on CBS

 It is not difficult to identify acts of overt racism in America today. They are blaring and clear violations of civil and human rights. Unfortunately, as a nation, our attention is so focused on mitigating overt racism that we ignore micro-aggressions against people of color -- acts of racism that are equally as damaging but harder to identify because they operate within the law. NEGOTIATING A HISTORICALLY WHITE UNIVERSITY WHILE BLACK unpacks many of the difficulties awaiting a person of color in academic spaces, allowing the reader to experience the types of micro-aggressions that subtly maintain a “Whites only” culture within academia. Jack L. Daniel gives a face and a voice, sometimes via humor, other times via heartbreak, to the African American experience in historically White institutions of higher education. It is an honest, self-reflective autoethnographic narrative that is thought-provoking and timely, challenging African American students to take responsibility for their own pursuit of excellence while at the same time challenging faculty and administration to play their roles in ensuring equal education access and success. by Stacy Johnson 

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Edda Fields-Black is a Carnegie Mellon University historian, author, librettist and — now — a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Fields-Black’s book “COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” was selected as a 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner in history. The prize, shared this year with “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” by Kathleen DuVal, is annually awarded to a “distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States.”

“COMBEE,” is the culmination of years’ worth of research conducted by the historian, who’s a professor in Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of History and director of The Humanities Center at CMU.

“I am truly grateful to the Pulitzer board for recognizing the Combahee River Raid and Harriet Tubman, the Second South Carolina Volunteers and the Combahee freedom seekers' quest for freedom as a significant chapter in our nation's history,” said Fields-Black. “I am humbled to bring the untold stories and unheard voices of formerly enslaved people to life. Thank you to the museums, research centers, archives, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, descendants of Harriet Tubman, the Combahee freedom seekers and planters, current Combahee River landowners, and the entire team at OUP for partnering with me in making ‘COMBEE’ possible.”

Tubman was instrumental in the success of the Combahee River Raid, the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history, which was based on intelligence she gathered as a Civil War spy for the U.S. Army Department of the South. Published in 2024, the book recounts the story from the perspectives of Tubman and the previously enslaved people who liberated themselves in the raid. Fields-Black herself is a descendant of one of the participants of the raid.

This spring, Fields-Black also received the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which is awarded annually for exceptional scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier or the American Civil War era.

“Edda Fields-Black has intellectual ambition, artistic creativity, the courage to be truly interdisciplinary, and she is an extremely nice person! I am thrilled that her groundbreaking work on Harriet Tubman's role in the Lowcountry has been recognized for the seminal work it is,” said Richard Scheines, Bess Family Dean of Dietrich College.

Sony Ton-Aime, executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures serves as an advisory board member for The Humanities Center at CMU.

“The moment that I read ‘COMBEE,’ I knew it would go on to win all the prestigious awards, but I also knew that the standard of history writing had been raised,” said Ton-Aime. “Every future history book will need to borrow something from ‘COMBEE’ to be considered as worthwhile, and that is a deeper care for the voices of those whose history it tells.”

Fields-Black: As I was pondering whether or not I could write a book about the Combahee River Raid, I happened upon the U.S. Civil War Pension files while conducting genealogical research about my father’s family. In them, I found a treasure trove of information about my own family members and the community with whom they were held in bondage during the antebellum period a few miles from where the raid took place. The voices (i.e. testimony) of formerly enslaved people resided in this little-tapped source. So, searching for my ancestors’ pension files, I identified the two Second South Carolina companies formed of Combahee men who liberated themselves in the raid. And, I began to think I could identify the people who escaped in the raid, reconstruct their lives in bondage and freedom, and tell the story of the raid from the freedom seekers’ perspectives. 

Fields-Black: Most Americans know of Tubman as the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad who liberated herself from bondage, then went back 13 times to bring approximately 70 enslaved people to freedom, gave detailed instructions to another 70 bonds people who liberated themselves, then became a suffragist after the Civil War.

In 2025, it is hard for Americans to fathom Harriet Tubman’s courage and selflessness, going back into what I call the “Prison House of Bondage” so many times to rescue family, friends and members of her community on the Maryland Eastern shore when she could have led a relatively comfortable life as a free woman in Philadelphia, St. Catherines, Canada or Auburn, New York. Then, during the Civil War, she risked her freedom and her life to go down to Beaufort, South Carolina, and rescue enslaved people she did not know, and (as she told to her biographers) whose dialect and culture she could not understand. Risking her freedom and her life so that other enslaved people could be free was a supreme act of bravery.

And, prior to the release of “COMBEE,” Tubman’s Civil War service — as a spy for the U.S. Army — was the least-known chapter of her extraordinary life. I set out to change this by documenting the Combahee River Raid and Tubman’s Civil War service and telling the story of the raid from the perspectives of the people who liberated themselves in, fought in and were impacted by it. It’s wonderful that more people are learning about Tubman’s leadership and selfless courage during the Combahee River Raid in which 756 enslaved were liberated on June 2, 1863 by Tubman, her ring of spies, scouts and pilots, Col. James Montgomery, the Second South Carolina Volunteers (300 Black soldiers) and the Third Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (one battery of white soldiers).

Since I happened upon Harriet Tubman in my rice fields along Lowcountry South Carolina’s Combahee River, I have joined with Harriet Tubman’s descendants and the many biographers, historians and artists working proudly to preserve Tubman’s legacy. I hope “COMBEE” winning the Pulitzer Prize will help secure the legacy of Tubman’s valorous Civil War service in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Fields-Black: The fight for freedom and equality continues today with no end in sight, unfortunately. We can learn from Harriet Tubman not to leave anyone behind in the fight, even if it means sacrificing our comfort and risking our lives.