Although white southerners lost the Civil War, they did not lose the cultural war—the struggle to define America as a white nation and blacks as a subordinate race unfit for governing and therefore incapable of political and social equality. In the white imagination, the image of black men was transformed from docile slaves and harmless “Sambos,” to menacing “black beast rapists,” the most serious threat to the virtue of white women and the sanctity of the white home. The image of black women was changed from nurturing “Negro mammies” to salacious Jezebels, nearly as corrupting to white
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