In 1827, 10-year-old Mary Ellen Pleasant who’d become famous as “the Harriet Tubman of California,” became an indentured servant and later a member of the prominent Hussey family, Quaker abolitionist shopkeepers in Nantucket. Her career as a “slave stealer” began when she married James Smith, a plantation owner who freed his slaves. At great risk passing as white, she transported many slaves to Ohio and Canada on the “Underground Railroad.” That work continued when she moved to San Francisco, becoming a prosperous entrepreneur. In 1866, her landmark lawsuit against North Beach & Mission Railroad Co. for racial discrimination went all the way to the state Supreme Court, earning her the moniker of “Mother of Human Rights in California.” Before her death, she confirmed donating $30,000 (close to 1M today) to her former lover John Brown’s attempted slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Her great wealth was depleted, she died in abject poverty in 1904 and is buried in Tulocay Cemetery in Napa.