Kanye West once again spoke on the topic of slavery and upset Americans over his opinion. He stated that the iconic Harriet Tubman did not free the slaves during his campaign speech in South Carolina.
The inflammatory remark, which was not backed up by any proof, resounded in Tubman’s family, leading her great-great-great niece Tina Wyatt to respond in a video message.
Tubman’s relative speaks on what she meant to the end of slavery, explaining that had she not gone on several missions to get hundreds of enslaved people free via the underground railroad, Kanye West would likely still be working on the plantation today with no platform to spew this sort of rhetoric.
“He would not be out there saying the things he says and he wouldn’t have the money he has,” says Wyatt about Kanye. “Because [the slave owners] would have it all. So, when he says that she didn’t free slaves– he doesn’t even understand who she was as a woman. I don’t even understand what he meant when he said that she did what she did so they could work for white people. I don’t understand what that meant. They had freedom so they could be able to work wherever they wanted to work, create businesses, and we started doing that. We started flourishing. And then they introduced Black codes to stop it. That’s what she would tell him. She would tell him, ‘Uplift.'”
