African American Youth Face Violence and Fear of Violence in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman or child was [lynched] nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob. It would be disingenuous to say that violence and the fear of violence pervaded the lives of many African American children, but it is not presumptuous to say little is known about how terror impacted upon these children or how they responded to it. Over time, intimidating challenges to their mental and physical well being such as sales, threats of sales, and indiscriminate corporal punishment, subsided. By contrast, other forms of physical violence, especially rape and arbitrary killing or lynching, became even more serious threats well into the twentieth century. The words rape and lynch are gendered and colored to the degree that many persons readily conjure up images of "white women" at the pronouncements of "rape" and think "black men" when they hear the word "lynch." Furthermore, con-ventional wisdom has suggested that black females are promiscuous and cannot be raped; therefore, white society placed little legal value upon sexual violations of these women but made the sexual abuse, real or imagined, of white females by black males capital offenses. 2 The late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century media did much to popularize and maintain the farcical relationship between the "black-male-rapist" myth and lynching. Historical data do not support sexual assault or the allegations thereof as evident in the cases of thousands of children and adults-black, white, and other-who died at the hands of mobs for charges of murder, murderous assault, accessory to murder, complicity in murder, poisoning, and arson. Other reasons, including unwise remarks, writing insulting notes, knowledge of theft, and mistaken identity, were the bases for taking lives. Furthermore, race prejudice as a cause for lynching illustrates the rash behavior of white men and women who rushed to snuff out the lives of per-sons they deemed guilty of an offense, racism, which they also harbored. Despite the W. King, African American Childhoods © Wilma King 2005 138/ AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDHOODS array of reasons other than rape or allegations of rape, the fear of losing one's life for intimacy, real or imagined, with white women remained constant threats for south-ern black males throughout much of the twentieth century.3 One of the most poignant realities of what it has meant to be a black male accused of sexual impropriety occurred in 1955 when Emmett Till died a tortuous death at the hands of white Mississippians. They lynched the fourteen-year-old boy for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Few of Till's contemporaries articulated their reactions to this tragedy as graphically as did Anne Moody when she wrote: Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me---fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told if! were a good girl, I wouldn't have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed.