Sexual Violence Targeting Black Women
Black women students at the State Normal School in South Carolina, 1874.
University of South Carolina Archives
Black women seeking to assert the rights of citizenship and freedom after Emancipation faced dangers based on their race and sex just as they had for generations while enslaved. Black women were killed in the same lynchings and massacres that took the lives of Black men, but they were also more likely to suffer the trauma of sexual violence.
In May 1870, 15 white men raped a Black woman while other members of the mob lynched her husband. Days later in the same North Carolina community, another white mob raped a Black woman and “afterwards stuck their knives in various parts of her body.” News of incidents like these spread through the entire African American community, devastating Black women with the terror of their dual vulnerability.
Enslaved Black women had no legal means to resist or protect themselves from sexual assault by white slaveowners. As early as the 1830s, Black abolitionist Maria Stewart called for the law to recognize Black women as full humans with rights to control their bodies and to grant or withhold consent, but reality lagged far behind.
In Missouri in 1855, a young enslaved Black woman named Celia was convicted of murder and hanged for killing a white man who had enslaved and repeatedly raped her. The court rejected her self-defense claim, concluding that enslaved Black women had no right to resist white slaveowners’ sexual advances.
White Southerners were determined to maintain the economic exploitation and political dominance they had enjoyed during slavery, and white men refused to relinquish their freedom to violate Black women with impunity. Even before the Civil War’s end, Southern state legislatures implemented laws providing different sexual protections to white women and Black women. The Georgia Code of 1861 specified a mandatory sentencing range for raping a white woman but let courts decide whether and how to punish rapes of Black women.
That is what they mean when they say, "Make America Great Again."