During and after the Reconstruction era, white violence against black men accused of sexual crimes rose dramatically. Officials, Ku Klux Klansmen, and other white vigilantes patrolled neighborhoods and attacked both men and women who were believed to be having sex across the color line. Fear of black people’s increasing political power blended with anti-miscegenation ideology, so that white Southerners translated black calls for economic opportunity and political equality into black men’s purported sexual desire for white women. This “threat to white womanhood,” one historian writes, upheld “a powerful alibi for denying black people the basic rights of citizenship.” The Democratic Party’s very coalescence across the class lines that divided whites was grounded in their successful fearmongering about interracial sex, which took on new urgency as “social equality” took on the insinuation of coerced sexual intercourse between black men and white women.16
Illustration decrying the horrors of interracial marriage, from Charles Carroll, The Negro a Beast (1900).
Democrats in the postwar South consistently asserted that African Americans would inevitably seek not only sex with white women but interracial marriage itself, and that the mixed-race progeny of such marriages would augur devastation of the pure white race. Blacks resisted this narrative: as the African American minister Henry McNeal Turner wrote in 1866, the notion that black men wanted white women was a “foolish dream” of “Southern fanatics”: “What do we want with their daughters and sisters? We have as much beauty as they.… All we ask of the white man is to let our ladies alone, and they need not fear us.”17 But the anti-miscegenation narrative was brutally effective in maintaining white power over newly emancipated African Americans. The ostensible sexual immorality of African Americans was a persistent rationale used during Reconstruction by white leaders who opposed full rights for freed blacks and their descendants. Whole categories of black Christians—ministers, lay people, and entire church assemblies—were painted with accusations of licentiousness, the repetition of which charge helped sustain and feed whites’ beliefs in their own superiority and the unfitness of blacks for citizenship.
Shadowing this creed in the South, incidentally, was the reality that many communities continued to tolerate the concubinage relations between white men (particularly those of high status) and black women who might well bear their children, receive financial support, and serve as a second family. The journalist Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line (1908) documented the commonness of these families throughout the South, while noting that “the better class of Southern people” were starting to attack these conditions along with other cross-racial encounters, starting with the clergy. When a Methodist pastor in Alabama railed against the fact that Montgomery had “four hundred Negro women supported by white men” and “thirty-two Negro dives operated for white patronage,” the local paper reported the statistics and railed against such vices.18 The anti-miscegenation taboo and the specter of rape also veiled the murky fear that white women might conceivably desire to be with black men if they could. W. E. B. Du Bois noted in 1913 that whites acknowledged but one racial problem, put most frantically as, “Do you want your sister to marry a Nigger?” As he observed, however, the ban on interracial marriage must be destroyed, “not because we are anxious to marry white men’s sisters, but because we are determined that white men shall let our sisters alone.”19
White Americans violently maintained the prohibition on miscegenation well into the twentieth century, most notably through the lynching of African American men and women. According to one study, of the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in the Southern states between 1877 and 1950, more than half were accused of murder or rape.20 The chief justification for lynching itself was its ostensible use as a deterrent to black rapists. Writing to the Nation in 1916, a white Northerner transplanted to the South spoke for many when he noted how “troublesome and insolent” Southern blacks were to whites and connected this to sexual brazenness before advocating lynching for rapists: “It may be bad to lynch, but is it not far worse for a demonized fiend, swelling with bestial lust, to lay his cursed hands on a pure, defenceless woman to satisfy his animal nature? Mr. Editor, you have never had a sister, a wife, or a child outraged by a beast who has all the privileges of respectable men.”21 As the study showed, white vigilante mobs killed black men even if there was no evidence or identification by the alleged victim. The Southern definition of black-on-white “rape” was expansive, as white laws and institutions refused the possibility that any white woman would willingly have anything to do with with a black man.22
Undergirded by white Christian visions of purity and sometimes ritualized by the invocational prayers of white ministers, large numbers of these lynchings were what one historian calls “spectacle lynchings,” with hundreds or even thousands of spectators present—some with cameras to document the occasion—in what was essentially a religious rite of purification. Prayer services sometimes preceded such lynchings. Many white churches, in fact, were patently indifferent to them, for lynch mobs often included their own parishioners. While some ministers condemned lynching and occasionally took action to prevent it or admonish participants, the expulsion of church members who had participated in lynch mobs could and did result in the defection of other members and criticism from the press.23 Many Southern white Christians believed the Bible supported the practice, some citing Phineas’s divinely ordered killing of an adulterous Israelite consorting with a woman of another race (he killed her too), recounted in the book of Numbers. The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia—Hose was accused of murdering a white farmer and raping his wife—took place on a Sunday, “just after church let out.” His torturers cut off his ears, castrated him, and burned him slowly—with “absolute order and decorum,” one paper absurdly reported, until he died. One older man was quoted screaming, “God bless every man that had a hand in this” and “thank God for vengeance,” even as men quite indecorously rushed to cut off fingers, grab pieces of bone and skull, or otherwise acquire a fragment of Hose’s dead body as a souvenir.24
Anti-lynching campaigns invariably faced accusations of abetting sexual violence, as when Tennessee representative Finis J. Garrett argued in late 1921 that an anti-lynching bill should be retitled, “A bill to encourage rape.” His Mississippi colleague John E. Rankin agreed, arguing the following month that the bill “will cost the lives of innocent white women and children throughout the South, if not throughout the entire country.” Rankin continued, “The shadow of the Negro criminal constantly hangs… like the sword of Damocles over the head of every white woman in the South, and no one knows just when or where it is going to fall.”25 No fear better maintained Jim Crow segregation than that of rape across the color line.
Legal segregation met few successful challenges through the end of the 1920s. But opposition was growing, and attacks on segregation expanded in the 1930s, eventually with some support from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Legal thinkers like Howard University School of Law’s Charles Hamilton Houston believed that segregated education, especially, was at the core of racial inequality in America and thus the key area to challenge. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, had long fought against racism and racist violence; under the leadership of Walter White, who became secretary in 1931, the organization commenced a steady campaign against the disfranchisement of black Southern voters and against segregation laws, especially their impact on unequal education for black students. The NAACP also aided the successful campaign to defeat the Supreme Court nomination of North Carolina judge John J. Parker—who had made comments opposing black suffrage—and spearheaded a major anti-lynching campaign in hopes of passing a federal law against lynching.
In the same decade, President Roosevelt—prodded on civil rights by his outspokenly liberal wife, Eleanor—appointed Mary McLeod Bethune, an African American Republican who became a Democrat because of Roosevelt’s policies
, to serve as one of his African American policy advisors, a group of African Americans sometimes referred to as the president’s “Black Cabinet.” Both as the founder of the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and as the Roosevelt-appointed director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration in 1936, Bethune worked tirelessly for early civil rights reforms and for “the integration of all [America’s] people regardless of race, creed, or national origin.”When, in 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that states providing a school to white students had to provide a school to black students too, segregation received its first major challenge since “separate but equal” was upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson. The following year, federal officials reacted when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Marian Anderson, the great African American contralto, to sing at its segregated concert hall in Washington; instead, thanks to the efforts of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Anderson sang outdoors at the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of seventy-five thousand people, black and white alike, and was introduced by Ickes, who proclaimed, “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.… Genius, like justice, is blind.… Genius draws no color line!”26
Many white Americans, particularly white Christian Southerners, were outraged by these efforts toward racial integration, and many worked vigorously to uphold white supremacy in law and in daily life. White Southern parents committed to this ideology continued to indoctrinate their children; as one historian writes, with extralegal methods of violence becoming intolerable, “white supremacists were forced to shift the process of socialization away from the public sphere and into the home.”27 Parents of this mindset did all they could to prevent their white children from mixing with black children, continuing to teach sons and daughters that they were superior to people of other races. White supremacists with more power to resist civil rights did so in the arenas they could, whether in housing discrimination, resistance to school integration, or political and legal work. Lynching, though in decline, remained the resort of choice for vigilantes.
The evils of interracial sex, and the specter of rape, remained a potent rationalization in this effort, the overriding basis for maintaining any means necessary to keep the races apart and control African American men by fear. In 1938, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi—a licensed Baptist preacher and an open white supremacist who was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan—invoked this rationale when filibustering an anti-lynching bill before the Senate in apocalyptic terms:
If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white southern men will not tolerate.
To outlaw lynching was to abet black rapists, Bilbo argued. Of all the crimes white Southerners could fathom, none was more worthy of swift reprisal, torture, and death than sex across the color line, an act that, even in the late 1930s, could only be fathomed as rape.28 In response and as part of an effort to counter the deep South’s belligerent hold on lynching and other racist practices, in 1939 Roosevelt’s attorney general, Frank Murphy, created the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department to work with the NAACP and prosecute perpetrators; the division took seven years to win its first lynching conviction.
As the 1930s turned into the 1940s, African Americans were making strides in educational and economic mobility, and segregation laws faced further challenges. In 1941, under pressure from the March on Washington Movement, Roosevelt banned racial discrimination in defense industries that contracted with the government and created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to enforce this mandate. In 1942, the NAACP opened its Washington Bureau, Marian Anderson sang in a fully integrated Constitution Hall, and a group of students at the University of Chicago founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which the next year organized the first restaurant sit-in, a strategy that would long be used by civil rights leaders to challenge segregation of commercial and public spaces. The civil rights movement for black equality would continue to grow and meet successes in many areas for years to come.
But Southern white Christians who were committed to Jim Crow segregation continued to resist. Many Southern Baptists focused renewed attention on evangelism and missionary work within the black community as a means of “improving” race relations and deflecting African American interest in the civil rights movement. In 1942, the denomination’s Home Mission Board hired a black man—its first African American administrative staff member—to serve as a liaison between the white Southern Baptist constituency and the African Americans in the National Baptist Convention. Denying him an office because of its pro-segregation policy, the board editorialized the following year that such mission activity “makes it possible for Southern Baptists to cross all racial lines in preaching the Gospel without raising the question of racial or social relationships.” That same year, the Florida Baptist Convention’s Social Service and Temperance Committee, also working on interracial missions, assured white Baptists that “a happy relation between the races does not mean an amalgamation.”29
Religion was no mere postscript to the anti-miscegenationist worldview that was part and parcel of American racism eight decades after slavery was outlawed; with the Bible its keystone, Christianity was deployed for disgust toward racial mixing. Numerous Southern ministers and lay people alike maintained that racial separation was divinely ordained by God and proven by Scripture: obliterating racial distinctions, contaminating white blood, and creating a so-called mongrel race violated God’s plan for humanity. Integration and intermarriage—which went together, the one advancing the other—fostered amalgamation, thereby demolishing the people God had picked to rule the nation and the world.
IT WAS PRECISELY THIS SORT of racism that Ruth Benedict devoted much of her career to combatting. She was appalled by the racial animus so acutely visible in the United States during her lifetime, and she wanted to help eradicate it. Her perspective was rooted in an understanding of human culture that prompted her to be equally skeptical of sexual hierarchies and universal morals. Her background and training made her an ideal campaigner to call out anti-miscegenationist ideology and elucidate it for broad public audiences.
She certainly understood the powerful appeal of religious faith. Born Ruth Fulton in New York in 1887, her childhood was steeped in the Baptist tradition, though her version of Christianity was somewhat different from that of the Southern segregationists. Her religious upbringing was conventionally strict, and she embraced the religious world of her devout mother and grandparents. As a child, she was a regular attendee at Sunday School and worship services, including midweek prayer meetings, missionary programs, and other church events, and she was devoted to her Bible and to the figure of Christ himself. Ruth’s childhood church followed Baptist tradition in concluding each Sunday morning service with an invitation to the unsaved to make their public profession of faith and seek baptism. She made her own public profession at the age of eleven and eagerly anticipated her baptism in her diary, writing happily, “Jesus will wash away my sins.” She had a fondness for the stories of missionary women her mother read to her, and at that age she sometimes imagined herself becoming a missionary to heathen peoples herself. Instead, the adult Benedict grew skeptical of many of her early religious beliefs, and her engagement with other cultures would lead her to see religion as a product of human culture, deeply meaningful to its adherents but not of divine origin.
Ruth received a scholarship to Vassar, where she matriculated in 1905. The question of female suffrage pervaded the women’s college during her years there, as did smoking—both symbols of women’s emancipation. At Vassar, she became enamored with the writings of Walter Pater,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Burroughs, Walt Whitman, and Friedrich Nietzsche. After graduating in 1909, Ruth spent a year abroad traveling in Europe and learning a great deal about foreign cultures, customs, and outlooks on her own home country. She then did a stint as a social worker in Buffalo, working with poor families—many of them immigrants—but, feeling helpless to bring real help to those living in poverty, she quit to take a teaching position in Los Angeles. But this work too felt empty in comparison to the vibrant intellectual life she’d had at Vassar. During this period, she read Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour, a manifesto that argued for full economic freedom, social independence, and meaningful work for women as the means that would “for the first time fully enfranchise” true sexual love between women and men and bring about “a higher appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations.” The work influenced her greatly, as a call to a feminism that would unify the sexes and overcoming the conflicts caused by old Victorian ideals coming up against new social realities.30 She married Stanley Benedict, a chemist, in 1914 and became Ruth Fulton Benedict. Though happy at first, she was also restless in their suburban town and, still more, intellectually starved. She worked on a writing project devoted to strong historical women—Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, and Schreiner—even as the marriage soured, with Stanley resisting her demands for equality within the marriage.
Moral Combat Page 13