Continuing Violent Racial Suppression as Justified by Rationalizing Myth

Racial violence in the United States is nothing new. What has been deliberately suppressed is the causes of such violence and it's constancy across centuries. To such cause even slavery is irrelevant, for such violence involved free blacks during slavery and blacks after such enslavement was at end. What has obscured such true causes for violence is the substitution of rationalizing myth to justify violent suppression. Chief among these has been the accusation of rape, attempted rape or other crime as justification for attack not just on the accused but for the terrorist suppression of his entire community.

Such accusation is an ingrained rationalization that has , nevertheless been used over a period of roughly 130 years to justify violent suppression of blacks, not for the claimed cause of protecting white women from black rapists but more for attacking any blacks whose superior achievement, accomplishments or efforts threaten the assumed superiority of whites. Such attacks for such real cause have a much longer history. Indeed, at one time wholly different rationalization for attacking blacks was necessary since the problem was keeping white women from willingly setting up open liaisons with black men.

The first law dealing with relations between black men and white women in what was to become the United States appears in Maryland in 1664.Entitled "An act Concerning Negroes & other Slaves" such law is the first to assume that blacks, unlike white servants, are to be slaves for life. The main thrust however was to discourage the epidemic of marriages between black slave men and free white women. To such end the draconian device of having such women enslaved along with any children of such marriages was resorted to by white male authorities of the era.11 Reluctant to compete with blacks who would be freed as white indentured servants were, whites instituted a lifetime slavery for blacks. Unable to compete effectively for the affections of their own women against slaves , white men found it necessary to tip the scales by threatening their own sisters, daughters, and their issue with permanent enslavement as a deterrent to marriage with black men.

Cause of Anti-Black Extra Legal Suppression

As sociologist Allen D. Grimshaw has noted " the most savage oppression" of whites over blacks "whether expressed in rural lynchings or in urban race riots , has taken place when the Negro has refused " or been perceived by whites as refusing" to accept a subordinate status.12 "With the end of slavery and it's associated legal system of authoritarian control of blacks , whites came to feel the need for an informal, extralegal system of violent suppression to replace legal slavery in keeping blacks at the bottom of American society. Such pattern first emerged in the north during the first quarter of the nineteenth century where slavery first vanished. In the Pre-Civil War period the urban race riot of the North (later copied in the postwar South) became the primary means of keeping the black in his place.13

Anti-Black Pogroms

From 1824 to 1849 John M. Werner found that 39 race riots took place in Northern cities "as a result of real or imagined assaults by blacks on the established structure" of white dominance.14 The underlying causes of these riots included, "distrust of black education, dislike of efforts at black self improvement, and hatred of abolitionism.13Basic to such prevalent white emotions was a deep-seated racial prejudice in which whites saw blacks as "something less than human". As a Boston publication sympathetic to blacks noted in 1842 , " all the mobs by which people of color have been hunted and persecuted , have been directed against their efforts and means for improvement . A negro brothel , or a dance house , might have stood in Moyamensing [a Philadelphia suburb noted for anti black violence] for a century, without being mobbed by the white populace ,or torn down as a nuisance..But a negro church or school house, or temperance hall, is not to be tolerated at all." Hence , the most frequently attacked targets by whites in the 1824-1849 period were black churches, benevolent institutions, schools, and businesses--"in short " states Werner , "places that served as tangible signs of black attempts at self improvement."14,13

In Columbia, Pennsylvania, prolonged rioting against blacks lasted from August 16 to October 2,1834. The main cause was white resentment at the success of black artisans and workingmen in the town economy. A local black, one Stephen Smith was especially detested as his prosperity as a lumber and coal dealer and largest stockholder in the local bank did not seem proper to many whites as fitting status for a black man. Such whites made a point of entering there detestation of black labor competition in the public record.15 The Philadelphia race riot of August 11-14,1834 was due to white anger over black job competition.16

With the end of slavery in Dixie, the anti-black race riot pioneered by northern whites was seen almost immediately. Vicious pogroms occurred in New Orleans (34 blacks killed) and Memphis (46 blacks killed).Suppression of the former slaves despite the federal policies of reconstruction was the purpose. The restraint of federal authority kept the reins on such southern race riots until roughly 1876 (12 anti black pogrom riots).The Federal retreat from civil rights enforcement, and Supreme court cases inimical to such cause released a torrent of abuse.

The Wilmington Race riot of 1898, was in effect an armed Coup d"etat by whites against a lawfully elected local government. Blacks had become leading and substantial officeholders (though not dominant) in Wilmington and New Hanover county. Black's made up more than half of Wilmington's population and included a cadre of enterprising businessmen and professionals. Black Attorneys and Physicians were competing with their white counterparts and their was labor competition between blacks and whites. A black editor went so far as to state that the often alleged attacks by black men on white women were not attacks at all but were spurious white accusations made when white women were discovered surreptiously but willingly granting their favors to black men. Using such cause, the leader of the riot (Alfred M. Waddel) also stated""niggers lawyers are sassing white men in our courts; nigger Root doctors are crowding white physicians out of business. We intend to change it if we have to choke the current of Cape Fear River with negro carcasses.

The Atlanta race riot of 1906 was the outgrowth of a white attitude that favored black genocide and rationalized it as a protection for southern white women supposedly threatened by the "New Negro Crime", rape, which blacks had adopted so it was felt, in frustration over the failure to gain the social equality that had emerged as a goal during Reconstruction.13(25 blacks and 1 white were officially recorded as killed) The dead included black women and children, including a crippled newspaper boy who could not outrun the white mob that swept thru the streets of Atlanta killing every black they could catch, entering Black businesses, killing the proprietors and emptying the cash registers. Later the Newspaper extra editions reports of alleged attempted assaults on white women by black men were found to be at house addresses that were vacant lots and upon women who did not exist. The political theme , however of deny blacks the vote to protect white women from black rapists had been sufficient to elect Hoke Smith governor and fuel a newspaper sales boom with each extra edition describing such alleged attempted assaults.Indeed the improbable nature of the epidemic of reported attempted assaults is clear from reading the involved newspaper reports. That did not,however prevent, the standard practise of summarily killing the closest negro found to the site of an attempted "assault".17

Such pogrom style riots, in which whites freely assaulted and killed blacks included Springfield, Illinois in (1908), Omaha, Nebraska(1919),Columbia, Tennessee (1946), and Cicero, Illinois (1951). Just after World War One major pogrom riots occurred in East St. Louis (1917, 100 blacks killed), Elaine, Arkansas and surrounds(1919, 60 to 75 blacks killed), and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921, 60-125 blacks killed). The Tulsa riot, involved the use of aircraft to bomb and strafe the black community. The cause of the riot was that a white woman thought that a black intended to attack her. See Grimshaw 18,13

Only in recent years did the nature of such riots change to those in which mobs of both racial groups sought to attack not each other but less protected elements of the opposite community.19

The historical significance of the race riot in this country from 1825 to 1960 was that urban whites employed them to enforce their dominance, extralegally , over blacks who had gained putative legal status of free persons in both the North and the South.13

Avoidance of honest competition where black performance exceeded that of whites , and or the failure to adopt a subservient status is the consistent conclusion of scholars in the field as to the reason for such attacks. Such motivation is constant across centuries , regions and national subcultures of whites. Such cause is even sometimes admitted by the involved whites, although the transparent deceit of the protection of white women from black rapist was proffered by those who slaughtered black women and children as an unquestionable rationalization.

Accusation as Rationalization for Lynching

The basic lynchable offense was not any particular act but rather any mood or inclination among blacks deemed by whites to be anything less than the complete subservience demanded by the "master" race. Lynchings of Blacks in the south before Emancipation were rare, because the slavery system was sufficient to maintain the unquestioned ascendancy of the whites.13 After the Civil War , the lynching of blacks by whites became a crucial extra legal prop for the reality of white superiority.From 1868 to 1871 there were over 400 Klan lynchings. After 1876, the federal abandonment of a commitment to the effective enforcement of civil rights for blacks in the south permitted the south to begin the construction of a rigid system of white supremacy that was essentially complete by the turn of the century. Integral to such construction was lynching. From 1882-1951 a total of 3,437 blacks were lynched versus only 1,293 whites (70% black). A, staggering total of 3,328 blacks were lynched in the former slave states, while elsewhere only 109 blacks met such deaths.20 The most intense lynching was coordinated with the, political disenfranchisement, greatly increased segregation and drastic erosion of civil rights of the decades immediately before and after the turn of the century.

Although whites rationalized such lynchings as a deterrent to murder or the rape of white women only a fraction of such lynchings even claimed such crime as the cause.21 Nor were whites especially concerned with guilt or innocence. On more than one occasion, when it was found that the lynched individual could not have committed the crime they blithely lynched another and upon a similar discovery another. Fundamentally the practice was a bulwark for White supremacy. The qualitative aspect of lynching was as a community ritual dedicated to the perpetuation of white supremacy. The macabre ritual was calculated by a combination of racism and sadism to have the maximum intimidative effect upon the entire black population of a locality and the surrounding region:

1. Ample notice was given so that all whites could take part and gather.
2. A mass spectacle was created for whites (as many as 15,000)
3. The doomed victim was burned at the stake. Such burning was prolonged for several hours while torture and mutilation was applied that generally involved castration.
4. Portions of the body were distributed as souvenirs.
5. Despite the fact the leaders of the Mob and participants were known they faced no legal consequences. Nor did law enforcement seek to oppose such lynchings.

As a "necessity" for the protection of white women from black rapist such procedure was utterly bankrupted by the lynchings of several dozen black women.

A mixed sex mob of hundreds of whites , while burning a bound black woman alive and while she yet lived cut her open and ripped the unborn child from her body and silenced it's birth cry by crushing it's skull under heel. She had dared to state she would report the murderers of her husband.22

Racial subjugation for the maintenance of an utter servility that challenges no white no matter how incapable is a ritual of racial terrorism ingrained in the society and character of such whites. Such roots run deep historically and they have repeatedly displaced action dictated by religion and morality and law.

The cry of Black man , white woman and rape has been the automatic initiator of monstrous mindless violence by white society against the selected black both to terrorize the black community and to punish blacks whose education, performance or lack of servility makes it difficult to fit into the all important centuries old scheme of white superiority.

While such cry and it's overuse may have bankrupted it's general utility today, the depth of motivation towards "any means necessary" in the maintenance of white supremacy is demonstrated over centuries. Whenever any new reasons are alleged as cause for attacks upon minorities or upon the efforts to rectify continuing discrimination such history makes it clear that rationalizing deceit is more probable than the cause claimed.

 

11."An Act Concerning Negroes and Other Slaves" 1 Md.Archives 533-34.

12.Grimshaw, Allen D., ed. Racial Violence in the United States(Chicago, 1969), pp 254-55.

13.Brown, Richard Maxwell, Strain of Violence, Historical studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. (New York, 1977)pp205-218.

14.Werner, John M.,"Race Riots in The United States during the Age of Jackson: 1824-1849" (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1972), pp4,273ff.

15.Warner, William Fredric, "The Columbia Race Riots" Lancaster County Historical Society Papers,26 (1922): 175-87. In 1842, Smith moved to Philadelphia where in time he became the nation's wealthiest black.

16.Werner, "Race Riots",Chap.6 WArner,Private City, Chap.7.

17. The Atlanta Newspapers for the year preceding Sept 22,1902 and the week following.(On Microfilm at Atlanta, Public Library).

18. Grimshaw, Allan D. Racial Violence in The United States(Chicago 1969) pp 46-55,153-61,73-87

19. Lambert, "Hindu Moslem Riots" p.218 Quoted in Grimshaw "Study in Social Violence".

20. Guzman, Jessie P. et al 1952 Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro life (New York, 1952),p.278

21. NAACP,Thirty Years of Lynching in The United States 1889-1918 (new York 1969) pp31-32,p.36

22. Dittmer, John. Black Georgia During The Progressive Era,1900-1920.Chicago 1977 pp201

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