Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (28 page)

It
is worth noting the similarity of experience, as far as women were concerned, between such disparate events in time and place as the Ukrainian pogroms and, for example, the Mormon persecu tions in this country and the periodic outbreaks of white mob violence against blacks. In each historic interlude a mob of men, sometimes an official militia, armed itself with an ideology that offered a moral justification- "for the public good"-to commit

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acts of degradation upon women. In each interlude a campaign of terror, and a goal that included the annihilation of a people, pro vided a license to rape. In each interlude the symbol of the mob's hatred and contempt became its exuberant destruction of other
men's
property, be it furniture, cattle, or women. Further, it mat tered little to the rapists acting under the cover of a mob whether or not their victims were "attractive." This, too, is significant, since it argues tha t sexual appeal, as we understand it, has little to do with the act of rape. A mob turns to rape as an expression of power and dominance. Women are used almost as inanimate objects, to prove a point among men.

Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, began settling in and around Independence, Missouri, in
1831,
to the local residents' dismay. Polygamy was not at issue-it had not yet become a church canon. The Missourians could not tolerate the Mormon belief in their living prophet, Joseph Smith, who communicated directly with God, their strange clannish ways and, surprisingly, in view of later history, the Mormon readiness to accept free Negro and mulatto converts, which the locals felt "would corrupt our blacks and insti gate them to bloodshed." ( Missouri was a slave state.)

A rowdy mass meeting was held in Independence in April,
i833,
and two months later a "call" was circulated to rid the state of the undesirables, "peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," for the sake of "our wives and daughters." ( A Mormon version of the mob's call adds the line, "We will whip and kill the men; we will destroy their children, and ravish their women!") The Mormons replied that their settlement was already at the western limits of United States territory and a further move would put them squarely among the Indians, who "might massacre our defenseless women and children with impunity." To show that they meant business, a mob broke into the offices of the Mormon newspaper and destroyed the press. The Mormons signed an agreement to leave the county within the year. Most of them crossed the wide Missouri and moved northward to Clay and Caldwell counties.

That wasn't good enough for the Missourians.
In
October,
1838,
the governor called up the militia and issued his notorious order: "The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary, for the public good." By this time the principal Mormon settlement was located

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OUR WILL

in Far West, Caldwell County. The militiamen marched on Far West, tricked the Mormon leaders, including Joseph Smith, into surrendering, and then, according to official Mormon history:

The mob was now let loose upon the unarmed citizens of Far West, and under the pretext of searching for arms they ran sacked every house, tore up the floors, upset haystacks, wantonly destroyed much property, and shot down a number of cattle, just for the sport it afforded them. The people were robbed of their most valuable property, insulted and whipped; but this was not the worst. The chastity of a number of women was defiled by force; some of them were strapped to benches and repeatedly ravished by brutes in human form until they died from the effects of this treatment. The horrible threat made a few years before . . . had been at last carried out-We
will ravish their women/

Back in the camp where Joseph Smith and the others were under guard, the militiamen "related to each other their deeds of murder and rapine, and boasted of raping virtuous wives and maidens, until the prisoners were heartsick with the disgusting details of their crimes." The Latter-day Saints were driven from Missouri. They began the trek to Illinois, where prophet Smith was lynched in a jail cell, and eventually to peace and prosperity in Utah.

Mos
VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACKS: THE
KKK

White mob action against communities of Southern blacks during the Reconstruction period featured the rape of women along with the burning of churches, schools and homes. The Memphis Riot of May,
1866,
grew out of white hostility to the presence in town of a black state militia unit. The mob, whom the victims judged to be largely Irish, and in collusion with the local white police force, wreaked its vengeance on the entire black com munity. Forty-six blacks and five whites were killed. In the Con gressional investigation that followed, several black women spoke of rape.

.j,

FRANCES THOMPSON: Between one and two o'clock Tuesday night seven men, two of whom were policemen, came to my house. I know they were policemen by their stars. . . . They said they

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must have some eggs, and ham, and biscuit.
I
made them some biscuit and some strong coffee, and they all sat down and ate. A girl lives with me; her name is Lucy Smith; she is about
16
years old. When they had eaten supper, they said they wanted some women to sleep with.
I
said we were not that sort of women, and they must go. . . . One of them laid hold of me and hit me on the side of my face, and holding my throat, choked me. Lucy tried to get out of the window, when one of them knocked her down and choked her. They drew their pistols and said they would shoot us and fire the house if we did not let them have their way with us. All seven of the men violated us two. Four of them had to do with me, and the rest with Lucy.

Q.-Were you injured?

A.-1 was sick for two weeks.
I
lay for three days with a hot, burning fever.

Lucy SMITH: We had two trunks. They did not unlock them but just jerked them open. They took
$100
belonging to Frances, and
$200
belonging to a friend of Frances, given to her to take care of . . . . They tried to take advantage of me, and did.
I
told them
I
did not do such things, and would not. One of them said he would make me, and choked me by the neck. . . . Af ter the first man had connexion with me, another got hold of me and tried to violate me, but
I
was so bad he did not. He gave me a lick with his fist and said that
I
was so damned near dead he would not have anything to do with me.

Q.-Were you injured?

A.-1 bled from what the first man had done to me.

Lucy
TIBBS:
A crowd of men came in that night. . . . They just broke the door open and asked me where was my husband;
I
replied he was gone . . .
I
said, "Please do not do anything to me;
I
am just here with two little children."

Q.-Did they do anything to you? A.-
They
done a very bad act.

Q.-Did they ravish you?

A.-Yes, sir. . . . There was but one that did it. Another man said, "Let that woman alone-that she was not in any situation to be doing that." . , . They put me on the bed, and the other men were plundering the house while this man was carrying on. . . .

Q.-What did they mean by saying you were not in a condi tion to be doing that?

A.-1 have been in the family way ever since Christmas. . . .

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Q.-How many rooms were there in your house? A.-Only one.

Q.-And this took place in the presence of all these men?

A.-Yes, sir.

CYNTHIA TOWNSEND:

Q.-Do you know of any violence being committed on the women in your neighborhood?

A.-Yes, sir; I know of some very bad acts. . . . There is a woman who lives near me by the name of Harriet; Merriweather was her name before she married. . . . There were as many as three or four men at a time had connexion with her; she was lying there by herself. They all had connexion with her in tum around, and then one of them tried to use her mouth. . . .

Q.-Did you see these men go into the house?

A.-Yes; I saw them going into the house and saw them coming out, and afterwards she came out and said they made her do what I told you they did; she has sometimes been a little deranged since then, her husband lef t her for it. When he came out of the fort and found what had been done, he said he would not have anything to do with her any more.

The Memphis Riot of 1866 was an uncoordinated mob action. About the same time, in Tennessee, a secret, organized force of terror haphazardly came into being and rapidly spread from state to state: the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated in the name of chivalry and patriotism to stopping the Radical Reconstruction movement. The ideology of the Klan as regards rape was typically two-faced. Blood oaths, mumbo jumbo and sworn compacts to "protect" Southern womanhood from the black menace, as sympathetically dramatized by
D.
W. Griffith in The
Birth
of
a Nation, were predicated on the false assumption, no doubt spread by the Klan itself, that rape of white women by black men was unheard of before the Civil War, thanks to the law and order maintained by the institution of slavery. The holy mission of the Klan was ostensibly to step into the law-and-order gap created by Reconstruction. Actually, the true political mission of the Klan had little to do with white women, although it was not the first and hardly the last time that "protec tion" of women has been used to hide a male group's real purpose. The Klan's nightriding was aimed at frightening off newly enfran-

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chised black male voters, who were naturally drawn to the Radical Republicans, the party of Reconstruction. Raping black women was one method of intimidation, along with unsigned threats, spooky costumes, whipping, burning and outright murder.

In
i
871 a joint Congressional committee began an investiga tion into the activities of the Klan, recently outlawed by an Act of Congress.
It
was a mite late: Reconstruction had already faltered, but the evidence collected as the investigation moved from state to state was most telling. Several black women who were called to testify spoke of rape.

HARRIET SIMRIL of York County, South Carolina: They came back af ter the first time on Sunday night af ter my old man again, and this second time the crowd was bigger. . . . They called for him and I told them he wasn't there. . . . They searched about in the house a long time, and staid with me an hour that time. . . . they were spitting in my face and throwing dirt in my eyes . . . they busted open my cupboard, and they ate all my pies up, and they took two pieces of meat . . . and af ter a while they took me out of doors and told me all they wanted was my old man to join the Democratic ticket; if he joined the Democratic ticket they would have no more to do with him; and af ter they had got me out of doors, they dragged me out into the big road, and they ravished me out there.