Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South

by Diane Miller Sommerville

Sommerville demonstrates that despite draconian statutes, accused black rapists frequently avoided execution or castration, largely due to intervention by members of the white community. This leniency belies claims that antebellum white southerners were overcome with anxiety about black rape. In fact, Sommerville argues, there was great fluidity across racial and sexual lines as well as a greater tolerance among whites for intimacy between black males and white females. According to Sommerville, pervasive misogyny fused with class prejudices to shape white responses to accusations of black rape even during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, a testament to the staying power of ideas about poor women's innate depravity.

Genres: History, American History

428 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2004

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sommerville argues against the cultural and scholar made idea of the "black-rapist" -- that throughout US history, whites have been so psychologically uncomfortable with Africans that they were always obsessed with black male sexuality and/or that black men were always docile and happiest under slavery and so they never raped or accosted white women

She uses statutes, published legal cases, court and related records from VA and NC, as well as secondary sources from/on the twelve southern states to tabulate and explain the change over time in how Southern society and law dealt with black male rape (or attempted rape) against white women between 1800 and 1900.
Key findings: the "black-rapist" ideology only appears at the end of the 19th century; before the Civil War, black men (slave and free) most often received a fair trial and the legal system (and the men who ran it) gave the same "fair" attention to these men as to other cases; most often communities divided along class, not race, lines in both who brought cases (almost always poorer white women) and with whom different parts of the community sided with -- "proper" white womanhood (purity and being a non-laboring wife with a living husband) guided these cases moreso than race many times

I don't doubt Sommerville's conclusions and the book includes a wealth of primary and secondary sources to back it up (the Appendix, a historiography of the "black-rapist" myth is of particular use to scholars of race, gender, and sexuality) --- but my 3/5 rating is more about her writing and organization. Sommerville is incredibly repetitive, perhaps she felt she needed to as she argues against such a strong cultural ideology -- but she consistently (meaning every page or two) reminds the reader of this idea she is arguing against. Her other arguments and findings get the repetitive treatment, too. She also has a tendency of hiding what I would consider important facts in her notes. for example, she often will write something like: Laws in all southern states said x, except for one. But she does not name the one in the text, or explain a possible reason for the exception. More discussion of her sources (exactly how many cases she has, from where, etc.) would have been immensely helpful, too.