The Rape of Harriet Tubman

This year marked the 100th anniversary of the passing of Harriet Tubman. I had the opportunity to celebrate that fact when I organized a special symposium on March 8, 2013, resulting in some thought-provoking critical papers on her legacy of resistance.

One of the more interesting conversations that came out of this event questioned why, on the anniversary of her death, we have yet to experience an epic cinematic treatment of her life. She is certainly qualified for a great Hollywood biopic. Against all odds, as a disabled enslaved woman, she escaped to freedom—having learned of the Underground Railroad that included support from black and white allies—and, once she made it to the other side, returned to slavery thirteen more times to free countless other slaves.

Tubman used wit and trickery in making her dangerous journeys in this secretive network, and even believed in her divine right and power to engage in liberation. She collaborated with John Brown on the raid at Harper’s Ferry, recruiting slaves for the project, but her illness at the time prevented her from taking part in the uprising. During the Civil War, she served as a Union army spy, nurse, and soldier, and in 1863, she led a successful military campaign on Combahee River in South Carolina, resulting in the liberation of 750 slaves.

In short, she’s the stuff of legend: for black history, women’s history, and American history. The fictional Django from Django Unchained ain’t got nothing on her! But in the year of her centennial anniversary, what does Tubman get instead of the great Hollywood biopic? She gets a “sex tape.”

You read that correctly. Recently, in an Internet launch of his new YouTube channel, All Def Digital, rap media mogul Russell Simmons featured a failed comedic video titled “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape”—the first in the line-up of this new series. It didn’t take long for black audiences on social media to utterly denounce this video and petition against it (started by Stony Brook University professor Crystal Fleming). Within twenty-four hours, Simmons removed the video from his channel and issued an apology.

It is amazing that Simmons could not have predicted people’s outrage upon seeing such a video, which implies that, in order to build an Underground Railroad to free the slaves, Tubman basically used blackmail against her white slave-owner by conniving with a male fellow slave to create a “sex tape” of her sexual encounter with the slave-owner that she could later use as “leverage.” Then again, this is what porn culture will do to one’s perspective—something Simmons has perpetuated in his decades-long involvement with sexist rap music and culture.

Just reading about the video’s premise was enough to make my blood boil, but sometimes, especially when you do media analysis as part of your scholarship, you just have to be a witness. So I viewed the video, and I don’t believe I am exaggerating when I say that, on this centennial anniversary, Harriet Tubman got raped.

Most of Tubman’s biographers have argued that there is no documentation that Tubman experienced sexual abuse while enslaved. She was definitely physically abused: she was routinely beaten, and at one point as an adolescent she suffered a head injury caused by an overseer who threw a two-pound weight at her head, breaking her skull and nearly killing her. The injury affected her throughout her ninety-one years of life; for example, she was often subject to sleeping spells (which Tubman claimed brought on various dreams and prophetic visions).

Slavery was “hell,” Tubman described in her narrative, which she dictated to Sarah Bradford since Tubman could neither read nor write. She experienced a great deal of trauma while enslaved, but if there were any experiences with rape—which marked the experiences of far too many enslaved women—Tubman remained silent on the issue. It’s still also possible that, as hellish as her experience might have been, she was spared the deeper hell that sexual violence brings to the picture. This...