Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (51 page)

Yet "the one crime" myth persisted in the popular imagination and those who joined the fight against lynching in the next two decades were forced to deal with it head on. Not surprisingly, political groups of diff ering persuasions in the nineteen thirties and forties developed divergent methods of exposing the rape excuse, which often set them at each other's throats.

In
1931,
eleven years af ter the enfranchisement of women, which the South had bitterly resisted to the end, a white church woman from Atlanta named Jessie Daniel Ames organized the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in direct response to lynch-law propaganda that summary mob action was needed to protect white female chastity. Working through church groups in fifteen states and one thousand counties, the Association women (white, middle-and upper-class ) began their political education work with a massive campaign for signatures to a strongly worded declaration.

"We declare lynching is an indefensible crime," their state ment began.

We believe that . . . public opinion has accepted too easily the claim of lynchers and mobsters that they were acting solely in the defense of womanhood.
In
the light of facts, women dare not longer permit the claim to pass unchallenged nor allow themselves to be the cloak behind which those bent upon personal revenge and savagery commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women. We repudiate this disgraceful claim for all time.

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Jessie Ames later credited female suffrage with helping to change the public climate in regard to lynching since the vote freed Southern women from "the oft-repeated and generally accepted statement that no real lady would degrade herself by participating in politics." Despite hooting opposition from many white male community leaders who felt the ladies were stepping into a dan gerous area in which they had no business, the Association col lected more than forty thousand signatures from their white Southern sisters in the next few years. Their activism did not end with the signature drive, or with pamphlets, conferences, question naires to politicians and plays performed at church suppers. With a bravery that equaled that of the Southern blacks who worked with the NAACP, they undertook their own investigations of lynchings to determine the real root cause and published their information in special bulletins.

Lowndes County,
Miss.
1933,-i.
Accused of insulting white woman-Hanged. Rumored that charge of insult to white woman furnished excuse to landlord to "put away" Negro tenant whose crop the landlord wanted. Visiting preacher conducting revival services for local church was told that meeting might be disturbed because "there was to be a lynching that night." He made no effort to pre vent the lynching. Lynching was not known outside the community until body, thrown in creek, came to surface some days later. ( Mob of about
10
men.)

"Taken from the sheriff," "taken from the courthouse," "taken from the jail," was the common way a lynching began. Outside the South the collusion of Southern sheriffs was a glaring fact that did not require any mincing of words. Inside the South, in the very communities in which lynchings took place, these sheriffs had a vivid personal reality and identity to members of the Asso ciation. A sheriff might be a relative or neighbor; in any event, he was the known local figure entrusted with the maintenance of law and order, someone to greet by name, someone who might drop in on that church supper, someone with whom one was used to exchanging civilities. To white Southern women, a white Southern sheriff was one of their own men.

"Whatever else may be said about Southern women, it cannot

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be said that they lack the moral courage to act according to their convictions," Jessie Ames was to write. "When from their own investigations of lynchings allegedly committed to protect South ern womanhood, they found that they were used as a shield behind which their own men committed cowardly acts of violence against a helpless people, they took the only action they could." By 1937 the Southern women began naming names.

Abbeville,
Henry County, Alabama, February 2-Negro accused of criminal assault on a white woman; taken from custody of Sheriff

J. L. Corbitt. . . . Impeachment proceedings brought against sheriff, who was exonerated by a 4 to
2
vote. . . . Testimony dis closed that the sheriff waited about four hours before he began to search for the mob. . . . The sheriff and his deputy never overtook the mob.

Milton,
Santa Rosa County, Florida, October 3-Negro accused of "unnatural crime" against a white boy and robbery of a filling sta tion was taken from Sheriff Joe Allen on highway and shot. Prisoner had been held at Panama City for safekeeping until time for his trial; he was being brought back to Milton for trial when the mob got him.

"WHERE WERE THE PEACE 0FFICERs?" the Association's bulletin asked. "All eight victims of lynching in 1937 were in the hands of Peace Officers. In seven of the lynchings, investigations indicate that officers of the law were either in the mob or were in collusion with the mob. In the eighth lynching no conclusive evi dence has yet been obtained. . . .
It
is difficult to believe, how ever, that any officer who has custody of a prisoner is entirely ignorant of an intention to lynch on the part of his constituents or is unable to identify any of the mob."

Someday I hope someone will write the full story of the fight to eradicate lynching in the South with special attention to the interorganizational squabbles, typical of radical politics, that usurped the energies and debilitated the efforts of all of the groups. Whose statistics were the most reliable, whether or not to support federal anti-lynching legislation, who was being namby-pamby, who was being inflammatory, who had the right to speak and who was an outside agitator, was lynching a product of "lawless eleA QUESTION OF RACE
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ments" or was it "carefully organized . . . with the cooperation of every ruling class agency," was it better to work quietly within the community or was it better to put forward a political overview the battles never ceased to rage.

The role of the Communist Party deserves careful study, for this was the grouping that put forward an all-encompassing politi cal overview couched in ferocious rhetoric. Sometimes the rhetoric contained brilliant insights that few had seen before and some times it was nothing more than a frenetic jumble of misstated facts. In i932, during a time when the Communists were at logger heads with the NAACP, International Publishers put out its own pamphlet on lynching that laid down the party line. Reserving a good part of their venom for NAACP leaders W.
E.
B. Du Bois, Walter White and Clarence Darrow-for their "dastardly evasion of the real cause of lynching"-the authors of "International Pamphlet No. 25" denounced the NAACP for promoting the theory that lynching might be understood as an isolated phenome non, the terrible sport of lawless, uneducated poor whites. "No," they thundered. "Lynchings defend profits! Lynchings are a warn ing to the Negro toilers. Lynching is one of the weapons with which the white ruling class enforces its national oppression of the Negro people and tries to maintain division between the white workers and the Negro toilers."

The rhetoric was terrible, the attack on Du Bois and the others was patently unfair, but the germ of the idea was sound. In i947 The President's Committee on Civil Rights issued a famous report, To Secure These Rights, which showed that Communist Party theory, in part, had been absorbed into mainstream thinking. To Secure
These
Rights concluded, "Lynching is the ultimate threat by which bis inferior status is driven home to the Negro. As a terrorist device, it reinforces all the other disabilities placed upon him."

"International Pamphlet No. 25" also had thunderous words to say about rape. In a style that C.P. literature favored, rape was never written as rape but always in quotation marks as "rape" and sometimes contained within the phrase "the capitalist rape lie":

The "Rape" Lie

To incite the white workers against the Negroes and to further build the myth of "white superiority," the white ruling class has

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coined the poisonous and insane lie that Negroes are "rapists."

The cry of "rape" is raised whenever any Negro worker begins to rise from his knees. We may be certain that of the Negro workers lynched for "rape," practically none, if any, were guilty of a crime committed innumerable times by whites against Negro women, and punished, if ever at all, by a few months in jail. . . . The first time we hear this lie is about the year
1830,
two hundred years af ter the Negroes were first unloaded from the slave ships in Virginia. Why did it appear at this time? Because
this
year marks
the beginning of the abolition movement in the North,
and
the
sharpening struggle
of the slaves themselves
for freedom. For
200
years the Negro workers were not "rapists." But as soon as their position as valuable slaves was endangered, then they suddenly became "rapists." . . . Many whites take advantage of the capitalist "rape" lie to protect themselves . . .

If
rape was a lie, with whom did the lie originate? "Interna tional Pamphlet No.
25"
hedged the question, but it allowed the reader to draw a fairly obvious conclusion. Af ter all, phrases like "the cry of 'rape' " and "the 'rape' lie" had a history. to them. Potiphar's wife had been a liar who maliciously cried rape. Thomas Jefferson had warned of those women who might cry rape as an instrument of vengeance. That Bible of American jurisprudence, Wigmore on
Evidence,
required reading for students in law school, cautioned against the female's tendency to lie.