A painting of Harriet Tubman that Bennett College has owned since 1931 goes up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York on November 18, and the money is going to the women in front of it.
The painting is Harriet Tubman by Aaron Douglas. It was commissioned for the college in 1931 by Alfred K. Stern, and Bennett, a historically Black women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, has held it ever since. Sotheby’s estimates it will sell for between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.
The proceeds will support the college’s future, including its Women’s Health Initiative. The sale falls in Bennett’s centennial year as a women’s college.
The detail that reframes the whole thing is that almost nobody studying there now has seen it. Cassandra Jones Havard, who chairs Bennett’s Board of Trustees, said the painting has not been on campus for close to two decades.
So what is being converted here is not a thing the students use. It is an asset the college has been unable to show, turned into health care and an operating future for Black women who are on the campus today. A small college with a hundred years behind it is choosing the living over the holding, and it is doing it with a picture of a woman who spent her life moving people toward something better.
“Aaron Douglas’ Harriet Tubman reminds us of the strength and power of women,” Havard said.
She said the centennial has given the college an opportunity to both acknowledge its history and look at what comes next, and she named the two decades the painting has spent away from Greensboro as part of the reasoning.
What the sale will actually buy is not itemised beyond the Women’s Health Initiative, and that is the line worth watching, because an HBCU raising millions in one afternoon is rare and what it does with the money is the second half of the story.
