Sexual Terror in the Reconstruction South

Means and Ends of White Supremacy

Books to Read

See esp. Lisa Cardyn, “Sexual Terror in the Reconstruction South,” In Battle Scars, 140-167.

Terrorism• Terrorism is not new—the original KKK was a

terrorist organization.• Frederick Hacker: “Terror and terrorism aim to

frighten and, by frightening, to dominate and control.”

• Sexual violence was normative in Reconstruction; it enforced patriarchal and racial notions that Reconstruction and Confederate defeat had unleashed.

• It was also a continuation of the culture of slavery, where violence and rape were expression of and ways to maintain the privileged position of whites.

“Animated by vengeance and hate, the Klan’s objectives weremainly instrumental—thus sex became an essential componentin their campaign to reinstate while male supremacy in its ante-bellum form, replacing the legal infrastructure of slavery with illicit supports of their own making.” Lisa Cardyn

“Nightriders, preoccupied with conduct they deemed socially,politically, or sexually verboten, surveilled the countryside for transgressors, upon whom sexualized punishments were routinely inflicted.” Lisa Cardyn

Types of Sexualized Violence

• Sexualized whipping

• Rape

• Genital mutilation

• Sexualized Lynching

Sexualized Whipping

• Most common form of sexual violence• Continuation of slavery, where the whip

demonstrated a slave’s lack of rights to bodily integrity.

• The Klan “took a young negro man who was in the house that night and whipped him, and compelled him to go through the form of sexual intercourse with one of the girls, whipping him at the same time.” Thomas Settle

Rape

• Similarly a continuation of slavery.• “Well, they were spitting on my face, and

throwing dirt in my eyes . . . and after awhile they took me out of doors, and told me all they wanted was my old man to join the Democratic ticket; if he jointed the Democratic ticket, they would have no more to do with him, and after they had got me out the door, they dragged me into the big road, and they ravish me out there.”

Genital Mutilation

• “The cutting [castration] and beating of the insolent fellow Balus . . . in the presence of crowds of his fellow niggers, has had a salutary influence over the whole of niggerdom hereabout. They now feel their inferiority in every particular to the white men.” Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor

• “despoiled of manhood” was a typical euphemism for genital mutilation.

Genital Mutilation

• “They gave her the knife and made her cut her hair off, because she would not give them a pair of scissors. . . . Then they took her out of doors . . . whipped her and made her cut off the hair of her private parts . . .she was not living with a white man.”A. Webster Shaffer

Genital Mutilation

• “they had a pot of tar and lime, and were going to pour [her vagina] full of it. . . . [They] made her lie down and held up her clothes . . . [and] poured it into her and took a paddle and rubbed it on her.” (no special provocation for this outrage)

• To a white woman living with a black man— “they took the woman, laid her on the ground, then cut a slit on each side of her orifice, put a large padlock in it, locked it up, and threw away the key.”

Sexualized Lynching

• Rare in antebellum days—slaves were property.

• Typically, a lynching followed castration.

• One man was “skinned. His skin was hanging over his neck, and his privates had been cut off and put into his mouth.

Why did they do it

• It was an effective tactic to enforce white supremacy in politics and economics.

• Southern whites wanted to insure that blacks were submissive, didn’t vote, didn’t hold political office, and were willing to put up with it.