The Power of Racial Rape Myths after World War II
This chapter reveals how African American men and their attorneys challenged assumptions about black criminality and forced urban authorities to confront these assumptions during the postwar years, when the civil rights movement expanded nationally. By World War II, instances of lynch mob violence had decreased significantly, but the specter of interracial sexual violence continued to govern trial proceedings, even outside the Jim Crow South. Many Americans continued to believe that black men were sexual predators and likely perpetrators of rape if accused, especially but not exclusively, by white women. Thus, these men specifically asserted that the trial system they faced in Chicago mirrored a Southern system of (in)justice that had not yet fully abandoned lynch-mob violence. Although they were not successful in gaining acquittals, their efforts expand current understandings of racial discrimination and re-imagine the geographic boundaries of the criminalized black male body.