Lois ’s Reviews > White Women, Black Men > Status Update

'The charge of rape against colored Americans was invented by the white South after Reconstruction to excuse mob violence,” wrote Du Bois in 1919, naming such violence as “the recognized method of re-enslaving blacks.'

'To white Southerners who wished to preserve racial hierarchy in the absence of slavery, it was crucial that both elite and nonelite white women minded the boundaries of the color line and gave birth only to white children. Without slavery to differentiate blacks from poor whites, it was equally important that ideas about the purity of white women included poor women.'

'Rebecca Felton warned white men that to permit a black voter to feel like “a man and your brother” would incite the rape of white women.'
The participation of southern white women in racist, white supremacist violence must not be downplayed and dismissed.
They made the KKK robes for their husbands, brothers and sons. They packed lunches and brought kids to publich lynchings. The blood is also on their hands.

'Rebecca Latimer Felton, who had grown up in a well-to-do slaveowning family, carried the figure of the subordinate but protected plantation mistress with her into the uncertainties of the post-Civil War era. Speaking before the Georgia Agricultural Society in 1897, “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts–then I say ‘lynch;’ a thousand times a week if necessary.”'

'“Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote. “If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”' Ida B. Wells quote in response to common lynching apologist sentiments.

'In the early 1890s, Ida Wells, co-editor and part owner of Memphis’s black weekly newspaper, embarked on a mission to tell the world about consenting white women. Wells, born a slave in Mississippi during the war, investigated more than seven hundred lynchings, published her findings in a black-owned New York newspaper and a pamphlet financed by Northern black women, and became the foremost antilynching activist.'

'Intertwining these unfamiliar dangers–the possibility of blurring the categories of “black” and “white” in a world without racial slavery, and the alarm of diminishing white supremacy–white people fastened on the taboo of sex between black men and white women with newfound urgency.'

'The new freedoms claimed by black men and women were extremely troubling to whites, but the ... men among the former slaves that carried the gravest danger, especially in the eyes of white patriarchs. Because it was the men of the free black population who now gained formal political power and began to achieve economic independence, it was they who had enormous potential to destroy the South’s racial caste system.'

'Just as dominant ideology held that black women seduced white men, it also held that poor white women could coerce black men. Even as wealthier white women held the real power of coercion, they were protected from censure by those who held authority in their communities and by dominant ideas about white female virtue. And in such equations of seduction and coercion, only “seduced” white men were wholly innocent.'

Interesting how the definition of 'white' people evolves. Claims of Portuguese folks 'passing' as white seem ludicrous from this date. Goodness no wonder so many southern white folks have shocks when they use ancestry DNA services. I think there is a huge tendency to think of blacks as having European ancestry without acknowledging that passing means many white folks have chattel slave ancestry unbeknownst to them.