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White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960

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Description

For decades, historians have primarily analyzed charges of black-on-white rape within the South through accounts of lynching or manifestly unfair trial proceedings, suggesting that white southerners invariably responded with extralegal violence and sham trials when white women accused black men of assault. Lisa Lindquist Dorr challenges this view with a careful study of legal records, newspapers, and clemency files from early-twentieth-century Virginia. White Virginians’ inflammatory rhetoric, she argues, didn’t necessarily predict black men’s ultimate punishment.

While trials were ceaselessly grand public spectacles at which white men acted to offer protection to white women and to police interracial relationships, Dorr points to cracks in white solidarity across class and gender lines. On the same time, trials and pardon proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities to challenge white racial power. Taken together, these cases uncover a world through which the mandates of segregation didn’t all the time hold sway, through which whites and blacks interacted in essentially the most intimate of ways, and through which white women and white men saw their interests in conflict.

In Dorr’s account, cases of black-on-white rape remove darkness from the paradoxes On the heart of segregated southern society: the tension between civilization and savagery, the desire for orderly and predictable racial boundaries regardless of conflicts among whites and relationships across racial boundaries, and the dignity of African Americans in a system dependent on their supposed inferiority. The rhetoric of protecting white women spoke of white supremacy and patriarchy, but its practice revealed the limits of both.

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