Slavery in Mississippi and throughout the South had been characterized by forced breeding and relentless sexual violence. Yet the sons and grandsons of the men who built that system, and who fought to defend it during the Civil War, built their postbellum Southern culture around the constant fear that Black men were fixated on raping white women. And even though the South’s defeat at the war’s end failed to stop the raping of Black women, these sons and grandsons of enslavers invented a palliative for their fears: lynching.
