| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 217 words from this article are provided below; about 592 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Diane Miller Sommerville. Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 411. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95.
In 1881, an eight-year-old white girl named Charlotte Ann Klutz alleged that a sixteen-year-old black neighbor named Morris Locke had raped her. A doctor's examination found "bloody tears to the girl's vagina and perineum" (p. 202). Locke was arrested and tried for sexual assault, but the case ended without a verdict. Tried a second time, the jury again could not agree that Locke was guilty as charged. Instead, it sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor at the state penitentiary for assault with intent to commit rape.	1
This case, unearthed by Diane Miller Sommerville, defies standard interpretations of the Jim Crow South. Generations of scholars have noted the tendency of the white South to exact swift punishment, often in the form of lynching, against black males accused of assaulting white females, especially young girls. Sommerville argues that not only was lynching far from inevitable in such cases but that even the conviction of alleged black rapists was uncertain. The fluidity of white southern responses to black-on-white rape, Sommerville believes, pushes us to reexamine our understanding of the nineteenth-century South.	. . .

There are about 592 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.