Can you imagine the German Bundestag issuing a formal apology for the
Nazi atrocities, but then leaving out the fact that Jews were the
primary victims?
Earlier this summer the U.S. Senate apologized for its earlier failures
to approve anti-lynching legislation. The resolution was supported by
liberal senators such as Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Biden of
Delaware, and others.
The apology notes, "at least 4,742 people, predominantly
African-Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between
1882 and 1968."
The resolution is well-intentioned, but it air-brushes out one essential
fact: Virtually all of the victims were male, many of whom were accused
of ravishing well-to-do white women.
Men so charged were summarily dragged away by the mob and strung from a
tree. Once the crowd had gathered, men were stripped of their clothes
and their dignity. Many had their bodies riddled with bullets. In the
most gruesome cases, the men were burned at the stake.
The hysteria that surrounded these incidents was stoked by inflammatory
headlines about "big black brutes" and "monsters in human form."
Newspaper articles featured caricatures of Black men with insatiable
sexual appetites for white virgins. As Philip Dray notes in his book At
the Hands of Persons Unknown, "the cumulative impression was of a world
made precarious by Negroes."
The fear of marauding male predators reached a fever pitch during the
early part of the last century. In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave
Traffic Act, which forbade the interstate transport of white women "for
the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral
purpose."
That law was used to prosecute championship boxer Jack Johnson for
taking his white girlfriend, Lucille Cameron, to Chicago for "immoral
purposes." Even though the two soon married, Johnson was convicted in
1913, but fled to Europe to avoid serving time for a crime that he knew
he had not committed.
Rape hysteria became a flashpoint in America's broader race relations
problems. Those relations reached their nadir during the Red Summer of
1919, when race riots broke out in more than 20 cities.
In Washington DC, news of the sexual assault of an officer's wife
triggered the spectacle of hundreds of uniformed sailors and soldiers
who chased and beat Blacks, all within view of the US Capitol building.
The report later turned out to be a hoax.
The slaying of innocent Black males continued for many years.
One of those innocents was Emmett Till, who one day pulled up to the
grocery store in Money, Mississippi. On a dare, he took the hand of the
cashier, a local beauty by the name of Carolyn Bryant, and asked, "How
about a date, baby?" Mrs. Bryant was offended by the overture and word
soon reached her husband.
A week later, the mutilated body of Emmett Till floated to the surface
of the Tallahatchie River. He had been shot through the right temple and
his skull had been struck with an ax.
That was August 1955. Emmett Till was 14 years old.
In 1991 Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. He came to
the post with a Yale Law School degree and broad legal experience. But
then he was ambushed by Anita Hill, who claimed that Thomas had made
sexually inappropriate remarks several years before.
Smarting under the allegation, Thomas complained to the Senate Judiciary
Committee that he was the victim of "a high-tech lynching." Mr. Thomas
was saying that the fear of male sexuality that fueled the lynching of
Black men decades before was the same hysteria that now drove people to
obsess over Anita Hill's over-blown allegation.
On June 9, 2005 Sen. Joe Biden introduced the Violence Against Women
Act, a bill that aims to thwart sexual and physical assaults of women. A
reading of the proposed law describes a world made precarious by men.
Sadly, the Act appeals to the same chivalrous instincts as when the
zealotry surrounding virtuous womanhood swept our nation a century ago.
Only four days later, on June 13, the Senate expressed its "deepest
sympathies and most solemn regrets" to the victims of lynching and their
descendants.
And why did the Senate resolution forget to mention men in its apology?
Because the last thing that presidential hopeful Biden wants is for
persons to draw historic parallels between the Violence Against Women
Act which portends the widescale curtailment of men's civil liberties,
and the injustices that befell wrongly-accused Black men generations
ago.
