Harriet Tubman

When Michelle Goldsborough returns to St. Michaels from her New Jersey home, it's usually to visit her relatives in the Talbot County tourist spot. Or sometimes she just might check into a room at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort and Conference Center to be alone. But last weekend when Goldsborough visited the resort - where she worked when she lived in St. Michaels - she had plenty of company. And that's just the way she wanted it. About a dozen youngsters - most of them black boys between the ages of 11 and 17 - were with Goldsborough.

HARRIET TUBMAN DAY Celebrate the life of Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman in Annapolis tomorrow. State senators and delegates will present the Harriet Tubman Day proclamation and citation to the Tubman family at the State House. A walking tour of historic Annapolis will follow the State House ceremonies and will end in a tour of the recently restored Wiley H. Bates High School, once the only African-American high school in Anne Arundel County. .................... Events begin at 9 a.m. tomorrow at the Maryland State House, State Circle, Annapolis.

Harriet Tubman By Beverly Lowry Random House / 432 pages / $32 In 1822, Harriet Tubman, nee Araminta Ross, was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation. She came into the world not simply as her parents' issue but as someone else's property. Along with her siblings, she and her parents were chattel, nothing more. Regularly, the Ross family was splintered by the harsh commerce of slavery. The child known as Minty was routinely beaten by despotic owners - punishment for transgressions that were often minor and more often imaginary.

It was an eight-minute triumph.Seven Baltimore pupils have won a statewide competition, writing a play that uses the form of a scene from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" to tell the story of Harriet Tubman and abolitionism.Using the opening "Macbeth" scene in which witches foreshadow the end of the play, the characters in the pupils' production predict the Civil War and an end to slavery. "Beware Harriet Tubman. She will become the Moses of her people and lead 300 slaves to freedom," says a character who jumps from a black caldron in the play.

Frederick Douglass will be hanging out in Fells Point. Harriet Tubman will talk about her pivotal role in the Underground Railroad. North Pole explorer Matthew Henson will chill you with tales of the arctic.These notable figures from African-American history will be re-created by character actors for the third African-American Renaissance Grand Tour."This is such a mammoth task," says Thomas L. Saunders, co-producer for the four-hour tour. "We bring everything to life. Including the musicians, it takes about 150 people to get this together."

SALLY FORTH today, my fellow Americans, and celebrate the Fourth of July. As you do, you might want to think about some of your favorite Americans. I've composed a list of the 10 Americans whose lives fascinate me most, whose lives I'd like to know more about and who were characterized by their own brand of grit and moxie.Perhaps you can send me yours.1. Frederick Douglass -- He determined as a boy that, although a slave, he would learn to read and write. He punched out a slave-breaker at 16, escaped slavery at 20 and became an abolitionist, author and orator.

Essie Garrett is running as if she were seeking her freedom.The 51-year-old Denver resident is jogging 25 miles a day, retracing the route of runaway slaves to raise money for charity and awareness about the Underground Railroad. The brutal trek -- which began Aug. 1 in Harriet Tubman's birthplace of Bucktown and will conclude in St. Catharines, Ontario, on Aug. 20 -- has included stops at historic sites. Yesterday, the ultramarathon runner toured the Hampton Mansion in Towson."For years our history has been denied not just to black people, but to all people," Garrett said yesterday as she stood outside of the Georgian-style mansion.

THERE'S TROUBLE around the bend in Guilford these days.While some residents would call it progress, the tony neighborhood off North Charles Street succeeded in reconfiguring some streets last year, limiting entrance to the community.Blocked is the Guilford gateway off St. Paul Street, restricted by ugly Day-Glo orange spikes that mar the landscape of stately brick houses and manicured lawns. Drivers must use other avenues -- and that's where the peril comes in.Greenway is now the prime entrance from the north.

Locust United Methodist Church in Simpsonville will hold a ceremony tomorrow to dedicate a street named for the woman who freed more than 300 slaves through the Underground Railroad.The stretch of Guilford Road in the Freetown neighborhood from Freetown Road to Cedar Lane has been renamed Harriet Tubman Lane for the abolitionist born into slavery in Dorchester County, who is believed to have been freed in 1849.In January, Howard County Council voted to change the street's name, and in March the new street signs were installed.

Silas E. Craft Sr., a retired school principal who promoted education for black students in Howard County, died Thursday of cancer at his home in Columbia. He was 76.Mr. Craft, who had a 32-year career as an educator, helped open the now-defunct Harriet Tubman High School in Simpsonville, Howard's first black high school. He was its first principal from 1949 until 1956."He was a no-nonsense principal," said Herbert E. Brown of Catonsville, a member of Harriet Tubman's first graduating class.

Verna Day-Jones, a versatile Baltimore actress who during her more than 60-year career working on stage, in film and in television was critically acclaimed for her portrayal of Harriet Tubman, died of undetermined causes Friday at Union Memorial Hospital. The longtime Poplar Grove Street resident was 85. "We are waiting for the results of an autopsy," said a daughter, Stephanie Carter of Baltimore. Verna Lucille Lee was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and was a 1942 graduate of Schenley High School.

Every day for the past week, 8-year-old Laila Dimakakos has run to the mailbox, hoping to find her ticket to a splendid summer and a wider world. In the case of this vivacious, loquacious third-grader from Loch Raven, the ticket is a U.S. passport that will allow her to board an airplane for the first time in her life. On the other end, she'll step onto white sand beaches and glimpse sea water as clear as a swimming pool. She'll fish with her uncles and try to master the language of her ancestors.

Mercy High School alumna named Fulbright scholar 2 Mercy High School alumna Dorothy Smith, a recent Boston College graduate, has been named a Fulbright scholar. Smith, a Parkville resident who graduated from Mercy in 2005, will travel to Jordan to study Arabic for two months before arriving in Oman in August. During her year in Oman, she will conduct research on water conservation education and awareness. She is the first alumna in Mercy's 49-year history to be named a Fulbright scholar.

These are excerpts published in the past week on The Baltimore Sun's InsideEd blog: A belated push to save Harriet Tubman: Sun photographer Algerina Perna and I went [last Monday] to a community meeting at Harriet Tubman Elementary, where we found a dozen staff members, parents and neighborhood residents brainstorming to try to save the school before the April 28 board vote on the reorganization plan. The group is rushing to submit something to the board with ideas for recruiting more students to the Sandtown school, recommended for closure because of low enrollment and academic performance.

CHURCH CREEK -The rabbit had expired in the living room next to the wood stove. As any real estate agent can tell you, animal remains are a little like cluttered dens and ugly wallpaper. They don't show well. "Probably not the best selling point," Jordan Loran noted as he carried the carcass to the back door of the state-owned Linthicum House in Dorchester County. Not that the house is up for sale, exactly. Loran's employer, the State of Maryland, would actually be delighted to give it away, free, to anyone willing to relocate the rundown yet solid three-story structure.

POP MUSIC Singing jazz Kurt Elling is one of the most daring male vocalists working in jazz today. A sharply intelligent stylist with an expansive range, he pays tribute to Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane in a show of graceful standards at 9:30 p.m. Saturday at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St. N.W., Washington. Tickets are $30. Call 800-444-1324 or 202-467-4600 or go to kennedy-center.org. FILM At the Charles You've seen the winners of America's Oscars; now take a chance on the movie that won four top Cesar Awards (the French Oscars)

As the nation begins a new political chapter with President Barack Obama, there is renewed momentum to honor a Maryland-born heroine who also sought to bring change to America: Harriet Tubman. Bills are once again before Congress to create state and national parks that would celebrate the life of Tubman, who was born a slave named Araminta Ross on Maryland's Eastern Shore. "We believe she was born in early 1822, February or March, based on several documents that have been unearthed in the past 10 years or so," said historian Kate Clifford Larson, author of the 2003 biography Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.

It may have sounded like musical pandemonium to an outsider, but those violin squeals, twittering flutes and rich mahogany-sounding notes emanating from bass fiddles and cellos late yesterday morning in the Aaron and Lillie Straus Foundation Recital Hall at the Baltimore School for the Arts was nothing more than an orchestra finding its pre-concert voice. Sitting on a small stage quietly and patiently taking this warm-up in stride were 17 first-graders from Harlem Park's Harriet Tubman Elementary School.

Cambridge - For decades, the people who came to trace the route of the Underground Railroad and the life of Harriet Tubman arrived on tour buses from New York and other urban centers. From black churches and civic groups, pilgrims came to see for themselves how Tubman led slaves to freedom, scooping up dirt from her designated birthplace. Recently, though, more and more visitors - predominantly white - are coming from Maryland's Western Shore to travel the back roads of Dorchester and Caroline counties in search of Tubman's legacy.

If history made a sound, it would be a musical one. It's easy to imagine the crash of cymbals and rumble from a pedestal timpani drum as musical elements of wars. There is also perhaps no better shoo-in for the disco era of the 1970s than the "chica-wah-wah" of a strummed electric guitar. But how might you connect music to America's history of bondage, brutality and beastly treatment of African slaves? What if you could take a person from that era and paint them with music that is symbolic of their legacy?