Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and gender discrimination.

Dorothy Sterling was a 20th-century American author known for her children’s historical nonfiction about abolition and civil rights. Sterling began her career as a journalist in New York, where she worked with the Federal Writers’ Project. Later, she worked for both Time and Life magazines. In 1950, she began publishing her own full-length books. Along with children’s historical fiction, Sterling wrote mysteries and books about nature for children. For adults, Sterling wrote several books of historical nonfiction, like 1984’s We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. In 2005, Sterling published Close to My Heart: An Autobiography. She won the 1977 Carter G. Woodson Book Award as editor of the nonfiction anthology The Trouble They Seen: Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans.

Sterling was a strong advocate for justice and the rights of ordinary people. She knew firsthand what it felt like to be discriminated against: Her original goal was to be a botanist, but her college professors discouraged her from pursuing this dream because it would be extremely difficult to find work as a female botanist. She lost her first writing job when all the magazine’s female writers were replaced with male writers. She was primed to be sympathetic to the plight of workers, women, and minorities when she read history books written by thinkers like Herbert Aptheker and W. E. B. Du Bois. Sterling joined the Communist Party in the 1940s, and after leaving the organization, she became an advocate of socialism. She left her job at Life in 1949 because she was appalled that the female researchers did most of the work for male writers, who took exclusive credit for the resulting articles. When she decided to write her own books, she wanted to find a subject that would inspire girls to be strong leaders. She found that inspiration in Harriet Tubman and wrote Freedom Train. This and other related Sterling books were among the first to attempt to convey Black history to young readers.

After publishing Freedom Train, Sterling joined the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and worked to prevent housing discrimination against Black people in her area. She testified before Congress in the mid-1960s about racial bias in school textbooks and later helped form the Council on Interracial Books for Children. In 1968, Sterling joined a group of writers and editors who publicly pledged to stop paying taxes as a means of protesting the Vietnam War. In 1976, Sterling led a successful effort to secure the rights of Massachusetts shellfishers to access fishing grounds blocked by wealthy landowners.