For decades, historians have primarily analyzed charges of
black-on-white rape in 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, did not necessarily predict black men's
ultimate punishment.
While trials were often grand public spectacles at which white
men acted to protect white women and to police interracial
relationships, Dorr points to cracks in white solidarity across
class and gender lines. At the same time, trials and pardon
proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities to
challenge white racial power. Taken together, these cases uncover a
world in which the mandates of segregation did not always hold
sway, in which whites and blacks interacted in the most intimate of
ways, and in which white women and white men saw their interests in
conflict.
In Dorr's account, cases of black-on-white rape illuminate the
paradoxes at the heart of segregated southern society: the tension
between civilization and savagery, the desire for orderly and
predictable racial boundaries despite 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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