Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and gender discrimination.

Dorothy Sterling was a 20th-century American author known for her children’s historical nonfiction about abolition and civil rights. Sterling began her career as a journalist in New York, where she worked with the Federal Writers’ Project. Later, she worked for both Time and Life magazines. In 1950, she began publishing her own full-length books. Along with children’s historical fiction, Sterling wrote mysteries and books about nature for children. For adults, Sterling wrote several books of historical nonfiction, like 1984’s We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. In 2005, Sterling published Close to My Heart: An Autobiography. She won the 1977 Carter G. Woodson Book Award as editor of the nonfiction anthology The Trouble They Seen: Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans.

Sterling was a strong advocate for justice and the rights of ordinary people. She knew firsthand what it felt like to be discriminated against: Her original goal was to be a botanist, but her college professors discouraged her from pursuing this dream because it would be extremely difficult to find work as a female botanist. She lost her first writing job when all the magazine’s female writers were replaced with male writers.