Harriet Tubman: A Legacy of Resistance

Harriet Tubman was a complicated woman, and in many ways, she remains a paradox. She is perhaps the most famous African American woman in the world, yet she is often overlooked or referenced as a mere footnote when the events for which she is famous—abolitionism, women’s suffrage, emancipation, and the Civil War—are commemorated. She was considered a “superwoman” of considerable strength, even though she remained physically disabled for most of her ninety-one years due to a severe injury during her adolescence. She is often described as an “illiterate” woman who could neither read nor write; however, her abilities to “read” the world—from curing sickness with her knowledge of herbal medicines to navigating the natural terrain via the night sky through her knowledge of astronomy—remained key in escaping and rescuing others from slavery. She was an ardent feminist and staunch supporter of women’s rights, yet her contributions to gender liberation go unnoticed and unrecognized in much of present-day women’s studies scholarship and curricula, as Vivian M. May elaborates in her essay in this issue, “Under-Theorized and Under-Taught.”

It is precisely because of Tubman’s complexities that this special issue has been assembled, in response to the earlier project of commemorating, during the weekend of March 8, 2013, the 100^th anniversary of her passing at a symposium organized by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany (Harriet Tubman 2013). We don’t know the exact date of this great woman’s birth, but we do know when she died—March 10, 1913—and honoring her on International Women’s Day, during Women’s History Month, allowed us the opportunity to reconfigure this legend in a global and transnational feminist context. In so doing, we have honored Tubman with the gift of more nuanced and in-depth considerations of her life, legacy, and symbolism.

Not only was it significant to honor Tubman during these women-centered holidays, it was also important that we held the symposium where we did. New York State served as a critical stop on the Underground Railroad and as the site of Tubman’s final residence and resting place in Auburn, New York. During the second day of the symposium, members of the Underground Railroad Project of the Capital Region, Inc. led symposium attendees on a local tour that included a visit to Troy, the site of Tubman’s daring rescue of Charles Nalle from a courthouse, where he was held captive as a fugitive and where townsfolk—at Tubman’s prompting—broke in and ushered Nalle away from authorities and across the Hudson River in 1860. There were also a number of “safe houses” in Albany, including the Israel AME Church, where Tubman housed several fugitives, and the home of Stephen and Harriet Myers, an African American couple who worked extensively with Tubman and others in creating complex networks in the antislavery movement.

Through these commemorative activities linked to the symposium, important conversations emerged, which included an inquiry into why it seemed so difficult for a contemporary audience to visualize Tubman’s story beyond historical inaccuracies, gaps, and silences in her life history, and stock stereotypes of enslaved black women. This issue was especially dramatized months later on August 14, 2013, when media mogul Russell Simmons featured and then promptly removed from his All Def Digital YouTube channel a sexually provocative video, “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape,” after angry protests on social media called for its removal. The video, featuring YouTube actors DeShawn Powers, Shanna Malcolm, and Jason Horton, implied that Tubman (portrayed by Malcolm) resorted to blackmailing her “master” (played by Horton) into supporting her Underground Railroad plans with the threat of a released “sex tape” of their sexual encounter, as anachronistically filmed by a male slave (played by Powers). Somehow, the historical Tubman remained beyond our twenty-first-century grasp, buried underneath distorted and outrageous representations. However, the public discussions that erupted in response to this controversial video—some included in this special issue—remind us of the power of Tubman’s story...