top of page

Miami Native Dr. Edda Fields‑Black Wins Pulitzer in History for Book About Harriet Tubman’s Fight for Freedom Through Military Service

  • Writer:  Llerraj Esuod
    Llerraj Esuod
  • 19 hours ago
  • 3 min read

Photo courtesy of Dr. Edda Fields-Black


By Llerraj Esuod


In a place where “Candy Ladies” sell pickled sausages and neon‑red boiled eggs from glass jars, fruit‑flavored frozen cups in Styrofoam, and Cherry Clans and Boston Baked Beans to wide‑eyed children, survival is an art form. Conch fritters, barbecued ribs, and fried fish sandwiches fuel weary but determined adults trying to stretch one day into two and make a dollar out of fifteen cents.


And yet, from these stitched‑together corners of survival in Brownsville, a subsection of Miami’s inner city, rose Dr. Edda Fields‑Black—a daughter of Brownsville, a keeper of memory, a teller of truths.


Now a distinguished historian and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Fields‑Black is the 2025 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.


“I’m still trying to process winning the Pulitzer,” Fields‑Black said. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing, but nothing has changed. I still have to pick my daughter up from school at 3:30 and find someone to braid her hair,” she reflected in context.


Dr. Fields-Black’s award-winning book re-centers Tubman’s lesser-known military leadership and the complex network of Black agency during the Civil War.


“As I surveyed the literature,” she said, “I realized that Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service was the least known aspect of her legendary life—and I wanted to tell that story.”


It All Started at the Kitchen Table


The love of historic preservation started at home. Fields‑Black is the daughter of Miami treasure Dr. Dorothy Jenkins‑Fields, a renowned historian and founder of the Black Archives located in Miami’s historic Lyric Theatre. She said her mother instilled in her daughters a passion for memory.


“It’s through Mom I gained an early love of history and understanding the value of preserving history,” Fields‑Black said.


She recalled their mother sending them out with tape recorders and question sheets, tasking them with capturing the stories of older family members.


From the Brownsville community to the scholarly halls of Carnegie Mellon, Fields‑Black knows her journey is not hers alone.


“I am not self-made,” she reflected. “From Brownsville to Mellon Carnegie—I am all of those places and in between.”


Like Mahalia Jackson’s “How I Got Over” echoing through a Sunday morning service, Dr. Fields‑Black’s work testifies to the evidence of things not seen. Her scholarship illustrates that, like the rose—thorns and all, that breaks through concrete, even the hardest soil can yield something enduring, something sacred, something worthy of the world’s recognition.


And to those who walked with her—those who held space for her questions, mentored her thinking, and made the way clear—she offers this:


“Take a bow. This Pulitzer is yours, too.”


Freedom Taken, Not Given


Through Combee, Fields‑Black reconstructs the 1863 raid that Tubman led along the Combahee River in South Carolina—a bold operation that freed more than 750 enslaved people. The book doesn’t just focus on Tubman as a hero but highlights the eight or nine scouts, spies, and pilots—Black men—whom Tubman recruited, trained, and commanded.


“Combee shows how Black people liberated themselves,” she explained. “Harriet Tubman did, yes—but so did the group of men she led. They didn’t wait for permission. They took freedom because they knew exactly what it cost.”


That theme of Black agency—people as strategists, organizers, and freedom‑seekers—runs through all of Fields‑Black’s work. A trained historian with deep roots in the African diaspora and West African agriculture, she first gained national attention with her book Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. There, she traced the tidal rice‑growing technology of West African societies and its transmission to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade.


“A summer trip to Sierra Leone during her senior year of college helped crystallize this focus. That’s when I began to understand how rice textures everything—and I wondered if that was also the case for the Gullah Geechee, particularly those enslaved on the rice plantations of the coastal plain.”


Indeed, her Gullah Geechee ancestry not only shaped her academic inquiries but also gave her a lens through which to reimagine historical methodology. “My roots helped shape the kinds of questions I pursued in research and writing,” she said.


Withstanding sensibility carries into her creative work as well. Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice is a contemporary classical and multimedia symphonic work she conceived to memorialize the enslaved Africans who died laboring on Lowcountry rice plantations. By blending music, archival narrative, and visual art, the requiem ensures these lives are seen, heard, and remembered.


“One of the missions throughout my career is to recover the voices of people of African descent who did not leave written sources,” she said.

That, she says, is what reparative history demands: “Uncovering hidden voices, recovering what was lost, and telling the stories that have never been told.”


 
 
 

Comments


REBEL WRITES

Subscribe Form

All rights reserved by Rebel Writes

bottom of page