“Thirty Lashes, Well Laid On”

This chapter begins with the first importation of African slaves into colonial Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. As their numbers grew, and interracial sex produced mixed-race (called “mulatto”) children, White colonists responded with a law designating all mulatto children as slaves, overturning a grant of freedom to Elizabeth Key, a mulatto indentured servant who married a young English settler and had a child with him. The chapter discusses the Slave Codes that stripped Blacks of any rights. Slave states also banned the teaching of slaves to read and write, lest they read “incendiary” publications and revolt, as some did. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the personal conflicts over slavery felt by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and the role of Madison at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in crafting the Great Compromise that legalized slavery as the price of creating a federal government.

The Tumultuous Island

The years following Sarah and Isaac’s conversion were ones of great change on the island, rife with controversies and rebellion. On the one hand the Brandon-Lopez-Gill clan was prospering, with both Brandon cousins and Lopez-Gill uncles making important marriages. Yet the synagogue was in disarray, with interracial sex often at the center of controversies. While unmarried Jewish men like Sarah and Isaac’s father suffered no penalties for extramarital affairs, married Jews and religious leaders found themselves repeatedly sanctioned by the synagogue, their intimate affairs laid open. Racial tensions on the island reached a peak in 1816 when a slave revolt broke out near the southern coast. In the years following the revolt, free people of color would seek compensation for their support in suppressing the insurrection. Petitions and religion, rather than open rebellion, became the new path to power.

White Women Forced to Live in Negro Dives

This chapter examines the subject of white slavery, interracial sex, and manhood through the 1906 abduction trial of Roosevelt Sharp, an African American man who was arrested for kidnapping white women. It argues that this trial and other accusations of white slavery indicated a contest between white and black men on the conceptual terrain of white women’s bodies, one that signified an attempt by white men to retain racial power.

Public Violence as Private Pathology: Noir Affect in The End of a Primitive

This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s midcentury noir, The End of a Primitive, explores the forms of private violence produced by the repressive public sphere of what he terms the short 1950s. Like many of Himes’s narratives, the novel foregrounds interpersonal antagonisms around race and sex, emphasizing the way in which what is repressed in the public sphere (interracial political struggle but also interracial sex) returns with a vengeance in the private sphere. In attending to the novel’s dramatizing of noir affects, the essay also articulates the value of the negative political and historiographical vision advanced by Himes’s noir narrative.

Race, Gender, and the Rape-Lynching Nexus in the U.S. South, 1881-1930

Scholarship has long recognized the centrality of white racial sexual fears in the rhetoric and practice surrounding the lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South in the decades around 1900. The topic has not previously been taken up for systematic study beyond event-level analyses. This article presents theoretical and empirical evidence that whites’ intersecting racial and gender concerns converging in racial sexual fears were conducive to lynching related to interracial sex, but not to those unrelated to interracial sex, under certain conditions. The empirical findings, based on lynchings in 11 southern states from 1881–1930, demonstrate that lynchings related to interracial sex were more likely to occur in contexts characterized by higher levels of white female dependents residing with white male householders, higher levels of white female school attendance, and higher levels of adult black male literacy. These findings suggest that interracial sex-related lynching served to recover and retain white men’s racial and gender status, which postbellum developments had undermined, by oppressing not only African American men and women but disempowering white women as well. White racial sexual fears during the lynching era should, therefore, be seen as constituting a social force in their own right with long-term consequences for race and gender relations and inequalities.