Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Scholarship details the sexual assault of black women under slavery as well as the Reconstruction and the post Reconstruction terror inflicted on black women by white men. Under slavery, black females found no protection from violence. In the Reconstruction Era black women enjoyed some legal redress. During the years 1920-1950 there are numerous cases of black women sexually assaulted and even murdered by white men that have not been examined. These cases reveal a large, even concerted effort to address this violence. In many cases the prosecution, local and state law enforcement, elected officials, community groups, concerned citizens and organizations like the NAACP diligently sought justice. Yet, even with this commitment, white defendants are not likely to be convicted or if convicted, their sentences/charges are reduced.
Of course, all women find it difficult to have their rapists prosecuted. Inadequate rape laws that provide loopholes for defendants and stigmatize women abound. Black women confront a “multiple jeopardy” of color, class and gender bias that makes their cases difficult to prosecute and to exact a guilty verdict from a jury. This paper argues that despite the good intentions of police, prosecutors and concerned individuals and organizations, the legal system continued to tell the black woman that in cases where a white man was accused of sexually assaulting her, it was “never against her will.”
Black women would have to wait for the civil rights and women’s movements to have such issues addressed in the rape statutes and for jury’s to approach such cases with a more informed worldview. Even then, accused blacks rapists and victimized white women were the primary beneficiaries of such changes.