Vox Day and Neon Revolt sure made a claim today - that Harriet Tubman did not exist. They base this on the existence of Earl Conrad's biography and on the fact that Conrad was a JEW (a Cohen, as it happens). He was also a "progressive" in the 1940s and you know what that means.
In "Conrad"'s own time the book got reviewed - by New England Quarterly, so it was taken seriously as a biographic work. I pick on the NEQ because it did not like the book. Even this critic must praise the book for its use of primary sources. Conrad went on to publish more primary sources. I do not find where others have attacked these sources for being forgeries. In the 1950s, opponents to the Progressive project still could publish.
Proving Cohen's perfidy would be a difficult task, inasmuch as some sources were by then already available in print to anyone who'd ask - in particular Sarah Bradford, Harriet: a Moses. But even before that as we may read (now) in Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History: apparently Franklin Sanborn, editing The Commonwealth in 1863, also noted Tubman's career and tried to make a folk heroine of her.
I am not Tubman's biographer and I am not here to judge whether Tubman deserves the praise heaped upon her, or not. (By most accounts, Tubman herself would not want this praise, contrast - oh - Sojourner Truth.) What is clear to judge, is that Conrad was no forger. The documents as I noted already existed.
Antisemitism makes men stupid. Or maybe it just attracts stupid and wicked men.
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