Book Review

In 1886 Annie Knuppel, a fifteen-year-old German immigrant living in Texas, accused Albert Johnson, a "mulatto," of rape. Although Johnson was found guilty in two successive county court trials, both verdicts were reversed by a Texas appeals court. The question Mary Frances Berry addresses in this case, which is highlighted in the title of her book, is why Johnson was released at a time when the myth of the savage black rapist was rampant and the lynchings of African American men were on the rise. The Texas appellate judges, relying on what Berry calls a legal due process story, reversed the lower court because the witnesses who came to Johnson's defense were men of prominence. These ex-Confederate judges, argues Berry, who privileged the testimony of the defendant's wealthy white patrons over that of a lowly pig farmer's daughter, were not so much upholding Johnson's civil rights as affirming the traditional paternalism of southern gentlemen. That they did so under the banner of impartial common law justice not only complicates the picture we have of late-nineteenth-century lynchings; it also exemplifies the way Berry exposes the intricate and persistent interactions of race, class, and gender in legal outcomes. The very same narrative of white paternalism, she suggests, dominated the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill affair, with Thomas serving as "the white man's boy" as surely as Johnson did.

. . .