History is often written by those who arrive late. Dr. Edda Fields-Black started where most accounts end—on the banks of South Carolina’s Combahee River, where Harriet Tubman commanded and led one of the boldest Civil War operations.
In “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” Fields-Black—a Brownsville native and professor at Carnegie Mellon University—reconstructs the 1863 raid that freed more than 750 enslaved people. Her research earned her the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History. Her mission, though, began long before the applause.
“I realized that Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service was the least known aspect of her legendary life,” Fields-Black said. “I wanted to tell that story, not just of her bravery, but of the Black scouts, pilots and soldiers who made freedom possible.”
Drawing from U.S. Army records, personal letters, and overlooked diaries, Combee reframes the raid. It was not a miracle, but a coordinated act of strategy and defiance. Tubman emerges as a tactician, intelligence operative and commander. She led men into battle and out of bondage.
“Combee shows how Black people liberated themselves,” Fields-Black 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 focus on agency runs through all her work. Before Combee, Fields-Black wrote “Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora.” She traced how West African tidal-rice expertise shaped American Southern plantations. A summer trip to Sierra Leone as an undergraduate revealed the connection. “That’s when I began to understand how rice textures everything,” she said.
Her lineage, too, grounds her scholarship. She is the daughter of Dr. Dorothy Jenkins-Fields, Miami’s own guardian of Black history and founder of the Black Archives at the Lyric Theater. “From Mom, I learned that history lives in people,” Fields-Black said. “Preserving it is a form of love.”
That belief fuels her creative work, too. “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a multimedia symphonic piece she co-created, memorializes the enslaved Africans who died cultivating Lowcountry rice. “One of my missions is to recover the voices of people of African descent who did not leave written sources,” she said.
Fields-Black said reparative history means “more than uncovering facts.” It means restoring humanity. “Uncovering hidden voices, recovering what was lost, and telling the stories that have never been told,” she said. “That’s the work.”
From Brownsville to Carnegie Mellon, Fields-Black’s message endures: freedom was not given. It was claimed, orchestrated, and hard-won—and now, remembered.
