In Lynch-Law, the first scholarly investigation of lynching, written in 1905, author James E. Cutler stated that in its narrow sense “lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States.”

DuBois calculated 1,700 Negroes lynched between 1885 and 1894. See gruesome report.

Most of the lynchings were by hanging or shooting, or both. Floggings and thrashings were so common as to go unnoticed, and had roots well back into slavery times. What occurred after Appomattox, at the close of reconstruction and during the socalled redemption of the South, all that was decidely worse. The traditional view was that northern meddling deserves a large share of the blame. During that period, many lynchings were of such a hideous nature-burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture --- the memory of them would be seared on the collective mindset of a locality for a lifetime. Lynching therefore was a cruel combination of racism and sadism, which was utilized primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many white people believed that Negroes were hyper-sexual beasts who could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.

Floggings were not unusual during slavery days, were often carried out by paddyrollers (bands of poor white males) and mostly inflicted on escaped or "out-past-curfew" blacks. "Where's your pass, Nigger." There are anecdotes of blacks producing a scrap of paper with writing on it having nothing to do with a pass, but since so few poor whites could read either, any writing would suffice.

The picture Lerone Bennett gives us of the lynch era is of a ploy with largely political and economic overtones. The manorial south after Appomattox feared more than anything the possibility of political alliance between poor whites and poor blacks. It is an irony often remarked that Reconstruction indeed worked -- but not for the intended beneficiaries -- freed blacks -- as much as for poor whites, who for the first time had access to public education, and increased civic participation.

The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments fell victim to a defacto nullification and interposition not through any legal or jurisprudential action, but simply through near-universal Southern (white) failure to obey them. The fourteenth amendment benefitted corporations more than the intended beneficiaries -- freed blacks.

Lerone Bennett says, "During the 1880's and 1890's the long-subdued poor whites exploded in an orgy of agrarian agitation." The way to counter them was a simple and obvious one, race-baiting.

It was classic divide-and-conquer. "When poor whites and poor Negroes temporarily submerged their differences and demanded basic economic reforms, aristocrats ran up the red flag of social equality and the Populist Revolt collapsed. Reunited under a flag of white supremacy, white Southerners of all classes made racial solidarity an act of faith. Crossroads rang with the tremolo references to White Womanhood and "our sacred institutions." Men stood on courthouse steps --- a Tillman in South Carolina, a Vardaman in Mississippi, a Hoke Smith in Georgia, and gave Negroes hell. "The way to control the nigger," W.K. Vardaman told cheering crowds, "is to whip him when he does not obey without it, and another way is to never pay him more wages than is actually necessary to buy food and clothing."

The crowds loved it. They whooped and hollered and slapped their thighs and the demagogues laid it on the line. And then what happened? Lynchings -- naturally. In the peak years of the Terrible Nineties, which Rayford Logan has called the low point of the Negtro's status in America, a Negro was lynched somewhereddd every two days or so. Lynching became in C.S. Johnson's words "a hybrid pf sport-vengeance," became in Myrdal's words a form of "witch-hunting," became in H.L. Mencken's words a diversion which often "took the place of a merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra, and other diversions common to larger communities." Newspapers advertized lynchings in advance. Crowds came from afar on chartered trains.

As the decade wore on, as the Negro-baiting became more virulent, the crowds devised more tantalizing tortures. Victims were roasted over slow fires and their bodies were mutilated. Castrations were commonplace. Even white women, especialy those of low status, who had violated racial taboos were sometimes victims of the lash.

Bennett asserts that only a small percentage of the Negroes who died by the rope or in burning fires were accused of outright rape. Some were charged with testifying against whites in court, seeking another job, using offensive language, failling to say "Mister" to a white man, disputing over the price of blackberries, attempting to vote, accepting a job as postmaster and being too prosperous.

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Andrea Dworkin writes:
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social
form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

Susan Brownmiller
Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will writes:

Describing the rape complex in the Reconstruction period from the vantage point of 1941, W.J. Cash (a thoughtful white southerner) had written of 'neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls,' borrowing from a latter-day Freudian perspective. From where had the idea sprung? Four years earlier John Dollard, a Yale professor of psychology, had publlished a well-received appraisal of modern life in the South, Caste amd Class in a Southern Town. In it Dollard quoted verbatim the views of Helene Deutsch, which he claimed to find 'illuminating.' Deutsch, he reported, had analyzed several white Southern women in whom she had found 'marked sexual attraction to Negro men and masochistic fantasies connected with this attraction.' Her blanket indictment followed: 'The fact that the white men believe so readily the hysterical and masochistic fantasies and lies of the white women, who claim they have been assaulted and raped by Negroes, is related to the fact that they (the men) sense the unconscious wishes of the women, the psychic reality of these declarations, and react emotionally to them as if they were real. The social situation permits them to discharge this emotion upon the Negroes.' [p 229 Against Our Will]

And thus we wound up with --- the horrors of the Lynch Era.

Brownmiller sees through the attempt by Cash (and others) to dilute, perhaps "for their own peace of mind" white male responsibility for the Southern rape complex. She offers for our benefit the 'illuminating' views of Freudian psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, as expressed in Psychology of Women. To wit:

Rape fantasies often have such irresistible verisimilitude that even the most experienced judges are misled in trials of innocent men accused of rape by hysterical women. My own experience of accounts by white women of rape by Negroes (who are subjected to terrible penalties as a result of these accusations) has convinced me that many fantastic stories are produced by the masochistic yearnings of these women.

See Susan Brownmiller's Rape Classic (Against Our Will).

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Sex and Race in America

See Calvin Hernton

Donald G. Mathews refers to the days of Jim Crow, and white man fears of superlative black powers in the sexual realm. "The whites' belief that blacks' sexuality was far greater than their own and that the license of such libidinous creatures had to be controlled." [ Religion in the Old South, p 71 ]

George M. Fredrickson quotes Ben Tillman on the image of the Negro as "a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour." [p 276]

The notion that blacks could be seized by uncontrollable fits of sexual passion was derived in part from the traditional picture of Africa as a land of licentiousness. As early as the 1840s, Josiah Priest, one of the antebellum proponents of the Biblical argument for slavery, attempted to prove from Scripture that the descendants of Ham had overdeveloped sexual organs and ... were guilty in ancient times of all forms of lewdness. 'The baleful fire of unchaste amour rages through the negro's blood, more fiercely than in the blood of any other people,' wrote Priest, 'inflaming their imaginations with corresponding images and ideas . . .' Later the racist propaganda directed against emancipation and Reconstruction laid heavy stress on the contention that freed blacks had an uncontrollable desire to violate white women. There is little reason to doubt the conventional notion that a fear of oversexed 'brute' Negroes has been a constant and deeply rooted feature of the white racist imagination. [p 276]

Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin White Masks digs into much of the excitement, the taboo, and the sheer sexual power of the attraction between white women and Black men. Negroes in the traditional lore of the white 'grapevine' were thought to have tremendous sexual powers almost primal in their magnetic enormity (p 157)

Fanon alludes to the psychological conditions out of which the Black superiority myth arose (white man's feelings of sexual inferiority) p 159

Fanon (p 169) notes the deep rooted connection in the collective mind, that the Negro stands for sex (p 160)

"Negroes symbolize the biological ..... he is hot-blooded ...blood is strong ... he is tough" (167)

Fanon quotes Michel Cournot, Martinique 1948 (p 13-14) "The Black man's sword is a SWORD. When he has thrust it into your wife, she has really felt something. It is a revelation. In the chasm that it has left, your little toy is lost. Pump away until the room is awash with your sweat, you might as well just be singing. This is good-by .... Four Negroes with their cocks exposed would fill a cathedral. They would be unable to leave the building until their erections subsided; and in such close quarters that would not be a simple matter." [cited by Fanon 169]

"For the majority of white men the Negro represents the sexual instinct in its raw state. The Negro is the incarnation of genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions. [From this, the white woman comes to] view the Negro as the keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies, of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations."

White woman tells the Negro: "Oh my God, you are so BLESSED!!" (what? compared to someone else maybe?) The Negro's response: "Hey don't mind me, I can't help it. I'm just a Negro. Whatever my endowments, they are a GIFT. You call my masculinity a blessing seems like a curse to me, you know."

Fanon writes: A white woman who has had a Negro lover finds it difficult to return to a white man. Or at least it is so believed, particularly by white men [Fanon, p 171]

Fanon quotes Etiemble:

Racial jealousy produces the crimes of racism: To many white men, the black is simply that marvelous 'sword' which, once it has transfixed their wives, leaves them forever transfigured. [the very hyperbole of it makes it potent]

Fanon mentions that for whites the mere image of the black athlete has become "singularly eroticized." He says: "There is something in the mere idea, one young [white] woman confided to me, that makes the heart skip a beat." [p 158] Fanon tells of a white prostitute who told him that in her early days the mere thought of going to bed with a Negro brought on an orgasm. She went in search of Negroes and never asked them for money.

Frank Petroni speculates in his dissertation as to the seeming unquenchable infatuation of many white girls. Petroni suggests that white girls may pursue Negroes because they want to spit in the eye of society, or declare their independence, and symbolically get out from under white man's thumb

Is there some kind of poetic turnaround going on? All through the first three centuries or so (of American history) there was an underlying theme, everything proceeding against the backdrop of what A.W. Calhoun called, "the Master's right of rape." White man 'owned' body (and soul if he could) of every woman, child, man in his domain. Not all of them abused the almost unlimited power they possessed. But some abused that power brutally. Even his own wife and children were not exempt from the power of this domination, legally, socially, politically. But at least his white wife (whether he loved her or ignored her) had status, and standing. At least she had family and kin who cared how she was treated.

The Black folk in his domestic household had no protection.

Yet there was a bitter hypocrisy, a terrible make-believe going on in the minds of the ruling [white male] elite. Gunnar Myrdal wrote how "the primary and essential concern of the white man" (and the society he ran, in its official intentions) was to prevent amalgamation

Beth Day in 1974 (and John Dillard) the roots of racism are to be found in the sexual fears of white men

p 7 -- "so many carnally curious white women in hot pursuit of the .... supersexuality of Black Man"

Are Black Men Superior

White men's sexual paranoia: are black men superior?

    See "A Stark Reality Check on Race & Politics in America" - as Todd Wooten's deliberately shocking book has been called

    See White man's fear of black man's primal superiority - is white man's fear becoming Black Man's reality?