U.S. President Barack Obama Pays Tribute To One Of Niagara, Ontario’s Heroines – Harriet Tubman

By Doug Draper

In a month of March when residents of Niagara, Ontario have honoured the memory of Harriet Tubman – a former black slave from America who went on to lead many enslaved people to freedom north of the Canada/U.S. border and spent time living in St. Catharines, Ontario in the 1850s – U.S. President Barack Obama has now designated a national monument in Maryland to her.

This  tribute statue to Harriet Tubman is in Harriet Tubman Park in Boston, Massachusetts, a state that was strong on abolitioning slavery  long before the Civil War.

This first black president of the United States made this designation during a month that many, including members of the Historical Society of St. Catharines and parishioners of the Salem Chapel (also know as the B.M.E. Church) in St. Catharines where this heroic conductor of the ‘underground railroad’ once worshipped, are paying tribute to her on the 100^th anniversary of her death.

And isn’t that something that we have a U.S. president with one hell of a job on his hands taking some time out this March 25 to remember someone who is such a large part of our cross-border, greater Niagara region history.

Here are the first few lines from an article this March 26 in the Baltimore Sun on this news.

President Barack Obama‘s designation Monday (March 25) of a new national monument to Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery on a Dorchester County plantation in 1849, then helped guide scores of other slaves to freedom in the North during the decade before the Civil War, honors a small and unprepossessing African-American woman who played an outsized role in American history.

Mr. Obama’s proclamation sets aside the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument near the city of Cambridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore as a historical preservation site to be administered by the National Park Service. It will be the first such monument ever to commemorate an African-American woman, and the fact that it is being welcomed by state and local lawmakers as well as residents shows how much has changed in the county in recent decades.

Read the whole Baltimore Sun article by clicking on http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-03-25/news/bs-md-tubman-20130325_1_tubman-park-harriet-tubman-tubman-site .

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