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Book Review
| Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. viii + 327. $49.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2841-6); $19.95 paper (ISBN 0-8078-5514-6).
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| Since the late 1980s, historians of women, gender, and the family have made great strides in mapping the difficult terrain of sexual violence in the American South. With White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960, Lisa Lindquist Dorr firmly establishes herself as one of a number of rising scholars whose interrogations of sex, race, class, and violence are challenging longstanding interpretations of southern social relations. |
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While the larger project of historicizing sex crime in this region has really just begun, chimerical beliefs about interracial rape have persisted, sustained by frequent repetition and a paucity of countervailing voices. Nothing better exemplifies this pattern than the widespread perception that a black man charged with raping a white woman in the South would, for much of the last century, almost certainly pay with his life. Based on a painstaking examination of 288 reported cases of black-on-white rape in Virginia between 1900 and 1960—a sample derived from newspaper accounts, court records, gubernatorial clemency papers, and NAACP files—this study demonstrates the contingency of white racial solidarity, its strength depending on corresponding alignments of class and gender. |
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Dorr marshals an impressive array of sources that at once contradict and refine much of the received wisdom about rape, race, and justice in recent southern history. Her research confirms the ongoing sway of the mythical "black beast rapist," his lily-white victim, and "the chivalry" determined to avenge her, at the same time it reveals an intricate web of relationships and interests that demonstrate the profound inadequacy of the standard narrative. Evidence from Virginia indicates that only a small proportion (6% = 17/288) of black males charged with the rape of a white woman were lynched before their cases were decided, while the vast majority of those remaining (87% = 230/271) were convicted (5). Yet sentences were hardly uniform, ranging from relatively brief prison terms to execution, with the prospect of conditional pardon introducing further variability. Informed by such factors as the location of the alleged crime, the timeliness of the charge, the presence of force and resistance, the reputation of the complainant and her family, and the defendant's observance of "proper" racial decorum, these decisions were significantly more complex than conventionally recognized. |
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White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race is richly textured by illustrative cases that are deftly interwoven to advance its central thesis. Dorr writes of Ruby Hogan, a seventeen-year-old white girl who accused a white male companion of standing idly by as three black men raped her. Here both the conduct of the white participants and the outcome of the proceedings deviated sharply from the traditional script. Thus Hogan was cited for delinquency, her date was given a fine and a jail sentence, and the alleged rapists were freed on bond. Equally suggestive is the experience of Luther Tyler, wrongly accused of rape by two lower-class white men seeking revenge against his insufficiently deferent black family. Despite a paucity of inculpatory testimony, Tyler was tried and convicted of capital rape, his sentence eventually commuted. Another telling conflict involved Della Payne, a married white woman who leveled manifestly false charges against her black lover when his fear of exposure led him to terminate the affair. He too was found guilty of rape and served seven years of a life sentence before a commutation was granted. Together episodes like these underscore the enormity of white men's discretion in evaluating charges of interracial rape. |
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Drawing on Ariela Gross's theory of racial performance (273, n.6), Dorr also stresses the malleability of white women's race, a subjective attribution based on class and reputation as well as race and sex. Especially compelling is the case of Fannie Chenault, a victim of attempted rape whose actions and demeanor rendered her unworthy of the protection bestowed upon true white women. Not only did she have difficulty identifying her assailant, but in deciding not to resist she had privileged her life over her purity; worse, she signed an affidavit containing "vulgar" words (exactly whose is unclear) deemed foreign to the vocabulary of the truly virtuous woman. Airing these suspicions during trial rather than afterwards, as typically occurred, was instrumental to the defendant's exoneration, his guilt or innocence overshadowed by his accuser's familiarity with verboten speech. |
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Legally trained readers may take issue with some of Dorr's more facile descriptions of the criminal justice system, for instance, her portrayal of the jury trial as little more than an arena for public spectacle (5). More troubling, though, is the cumulative effect of numerous small errors of legal fact and felicity that ought to have been corrected in the editorial process. Among them, defense counsel in one case is said to have given "instructions" to the jury, inadvertently displacing an accepted judicial prerogative, and his closing remarks are mistakenly termed "evidence," when as a matter of law they are considered argument (132). Elsewhere, a victim's mother, as opposed to the state, is said to have brought charges of statutory rape (301, n.130); an appeal to the Fourth Circuit is erroneously identified as having been filed with the "U.S. Supreme Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit" (205); and the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is credited with "ending segregation in public education," a seismic shift in social reality that no judicial pronouncement could independently accomplish (208). |
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Notwithstanding the book's circumspect tone and judicious integration of sources from other southern states, some will inevitably dispute the applicability of its conclusions to the region as a whole. Yet the pedantic impulse often reflected in attempts to valorize one or the other need not be indulged, for surely there is a place for both of these approaches. White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race provides ample testament to the advantages of the well-crafted local study and the complementarity of that method with more expansive inquiries. Dorr's intricate and provocative work deserves a wide readership among legal historians and others interested in issues of sexual violence, race, and justice. |
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