From Harriet Tubman to Civil Rights: Teaching Maryland’s Freedom Struggles

Teaching lens: Harriet Tubman • Frederick Douglass • Civil War Maryland • Reconstruction • civil rights • Grade 4–5 connections

Maryland’s freedom struggles are easy to fragment into isolated famous names and dates: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Antietam, emancipation, Reconstruction amendments, Brown v. Board, Thurgood Marshall, the Civil Rights Act. Students understand more when those topics become a connected study of resistance, law, geography, institutions, and community action.

Four lessons form a useful arc: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Resistance to Slavery, Maryland in the Civil War, Maryland After the Civil War, and Civil Rights and Modern Maryland.

Begin with resistance before the Civil War

Tubman and Douglass should not be taught as two independent hero biographies. Their Maryland stories reveal different forms of resistance inside the same slaveholding state. Douglass’s literacy connects to autobiography, public speaking, print, political argument, and abolitionist organizing. Tubman’s self-liberation and rescue work connect to secrecy, planning, landscape knowledge, family and community relationships, and trusted assistance.

The National Park Service’s Harriet Tubman education program explicitly connects her story to Maryland’s Eastern Shore landscape. The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site offers lessons on literacy, objects, homes, freedom, and public life. Those resources help students see biography as evidence situated in place.

Teach the Underground Railroad as a changing network

A railroad metaphor can mislead students into picturing fixed stations and a single route. A stronger explanation uses the word network: people, information, hiding places, transportation, timing, self-liberation, and assistance changed from case to case. Students can also learn why secrecy makes exact historical reconstruction difficult.

Use Maryland’s Civil War position to complicate simple North/South maps

Maryland remained in the Union while slavery was legal and residents held sharply different loyalties. Its position around Washington, D.C., and Baltimore’s port and rail connections made the state strategically important. That is a useful corrective to a two-color map that implies every person inside a state held the same views.

Antietam provides a major chronological anchor. The National Park Service offers an “Antietam Then and Now” resource for grades 3–4 as well as classroom materials and primary sources. Students can distinguish the battle’s military outcome from Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later.

Be precise about emancipation in Maryland

The Emancipation Proclamation did not itself end slavery in loyal Maryland because its emancipation order applied to areas in rebellion. Maryland abolished slavery through its 1864 state constitution. That sequence is a powerful example of why students should ask which law applied where and when rather than treating “emancipation” as one single moment.

Follow legal change into unequal daily life

After the war, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments changed national law, but legal change did not produce immediate equality. Maryland’s postwar history gives students several ways to see that gap: segregation, voting-rights struggles, the growth of HBCUs, industrialization, immigration through Baltimore, urbanization, and public-health reform.

Compare civil-rights strategies instead of searching for one hero

Twentieth-century Maryland shows why multiple strategies mattered. Donald Gaines Murray’s challenge to exclusion from the University of Maryland School of Law demonstrates litigation against an unequal state rule. Lillie Carroll Jackson and the Maryland NAACP show long-term organization. Students can also examine boycotts, sit-ins and direct action, negotiation, state public-accommodations law, federal law, and Cambridge community organizing.

The Maryland State Archives’ Donald Murray classroom packet is especially useful for showing how a court case is built from a specific institution and legal claim. It also creates a bridge to later school-desegregation cases without pretending that one decision ended unequal practices everywhere.

Use one comparison chart across all four lessons

Create columns labeled Problem, Strategy, Institution or Place, Immediate Result, and What remained unresolved? Add examples across the unit. Tubman, Douglass, Antietam, Maryland’s 1864 constitution, HBCUs, Murray, Jackson, public-accommodations law, and the Cambridge Movement will begin to look like connected history rather than a list of disconnected milestones.

End with agency and limits

Students should leave the sequence able to explain two ideas at the same time: people and communities changed Maryland through resistance, organizing, law, education, and political action; and no single victory instantly removed every unequal structure. Holding both ideas helps students recognize change without turning history into an inevitable progress story.

Authoritative planning sources: Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad NHP Education, Frederick Douglass NHS Lesson Plans, Antietam Teaching Materials, Maryland State Archives Donald Murray Case, and Maryland Grade 4 Social Studies Framework.