Untitled Note

White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 

Chapter 5 

Telling Tales 

White Women, False Accusations, and the Conundrum of Consent 

Considerations of character in cases of black-on-white rape revolved around public perceptions of white women’s behavior, but they did not always include insinuations that white women outright lied when they made their accusations against black men. Nevertheless, the ability to accuse black men of rape gave all white women an effective tool for getting themselves out of compromising situations. “Crying rape” against black men fed into white fears about black men as rapists and thus provided an ideal means for white women to divert attention away from their own social and sexual indiscretions. In most cases, allegations that a woman falsified a charge rarely entered into discussion. In some cases, a woman’s injuries or the wounds she inflicted on her assailant in self-defense made it clear that she had indeed been assaulted. Of course, there was also little doubt that a woman was assaulted if she had been murdered. In many other cases, whites evidently accepted the victim’s account with little skepticism, as long as she could identify the appropriate suspect. White Virginians, however, did believe that white women falsely accused black men of rape to serve their own ends. 

Those cases in which whites acknowledged women’s duplicity illuminate another aspect of the paradox of segregation. Despite being structured around patriarchal control of women, segregation gave women one particular form of social power: the ability to accuse black men of rape. But with that power came the ability to abuse it. When white women did abuse it, whites eventually abandoned racial solidarity. At the same time, because white women used charges of rape to mask their own sexual indiscretions, indiscretions that the white community very well may have known about, the cases themselves undermined white pretensions about white female virtue. Despite the rhetoric of protection that accompanied these cases initially, the subtext of illicit sexual activity eventually rose to the surface in considerations of pardon. These allegations challenged both the purity of all white women and the supremacy of white civilization itself, of which female virtue was the ideological cornerstone. In the cases in which white women cried rape to cover sexual relationships with black men, white women’s consent itself became a paradox. Theoretically, no white woman would ever consent to sexual relations with a black man, but white men constantly confronted the possibility, as well as the reality, that some white women freely chose black men as sexual partners. In the face of white women’s inability or unwillingness to protect racial purity, white men called on black men to subvert their innate natures and step in to protect the color line when white women failed. 

In 1906, Mabel Risley told police that she and her fiancé, Forest Gooding, had been attacked by a black man while they were walking in a public park after dark. Risley later amended her story, saying that the assailant had raped her while Gooding went for help. One week after the assault, Joseph Thomas was arrested on an unrelated charge. Risley identified Thomas as her assailant in a lineup, as did Gooding. Thomas was tried, convicted of rape, and sentenced to death.1 The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals affirmed Thomas’s conviction, but a dissenting opinion raised questions about Risley’s claim of rape. There was very little corroborating evidence, and in her initial statement to police, Risley said nothing about being raped. Justice J. Cardwell insisted that “the natural horror of this particular crime diverted the attention of the jury from a proper consideration of the evidence.”2 These issues justified the commutation of Thomas’s death sentence to life in prison. 

Twelve years later, the prosecutor in Thomas’s case, Crandall Mackey, who was now a judge, argued that Thomas should be released. Mackey argued that he was unconvinced that Risley had accurately identified her assailant and stated that his doubts were solidified by a statement made by Risley herself. “When I talked to her last and asked her if she was absolutely certain that Joe Thomas was the man,” he recounted, “she said as near as I can recall, ‘What is the difference if he is not the man[;] it is one less nigger in the world if they hang him.’ . . . I think that she was ready to identify anyone who looked like the man.”3 Her response troubled Mackey enough to argue for Thomas’s release, though the governor refused his petition. 

Risley’s frank admission that she did not care if she identified the correct man, as long as the man held responsible was black, convinced the prosecuting attorney that Thomas was innocent. Risley’s willingness to sacrifice an innocent black man, however, also raised more fundamental questions about her credibility. Mackey petitioned a second time for Thomas’s release, and this time he shifted his focus from Mabel Risley’s racism to questions about her reputation for chastity. He insisted that “there were circumstances in the case which cast a great deal of doubt as to whether Miss Risley was ever raped.” He did not raise new information concerning Thomas’s case, but he drew a parallel with another case. Shortly after Thomas’s conviction, a young white woman who lived next door to Mackey accused a black man of raping her and shooting her escort. After an investigation, she admitted that her brother had caught her and her escort engaging in sexual activity and had fired the shot. Shortly thereafter, this woman married the escort. Mackey pointed out that in the time between Risley’s assault and the trial, she and Gooding married. He insinuated that Risley cried rape to hide her premarital sexual relations. In Mackey’s eyes, Risley was no longer an innocent victim requiring white men’s protection. Instead, she was a conniving woman willing to use her power as a white woman to manipulate a racist legal system to cover up her own indiscretions. She had never needed white men’s protection and she certainly did not deserve it. With the focus of the petition squarely on the victim, the governor agreed that sufficient doubt had been raised regarding Thomas’s guilt. He was released in 1922.4 Thomas’s possible innocence alone did not justify his release. Only when questions about his guilt were paired with allegations that Risley abused her power as a white woman—abused her very whiteness itself—by manipulating social fears of black rapists was Thomas’s freedom justified. 

Risley’s statement that executing Thomas even if innocent would result in “one less nigger” stripped the veneer from white legal officials’ pretensions that their judgments in cases of black­on-white rape represented justice and likely accounted for officials’ disgust toward her. Their disgust, however, also reflected their awareness that white women could use beliefs about black men as rapists as a tool to achieve to their own ends. White women could manipulate white men’s worst fears to their own advantage. Indeed, the alleged victim in Thomas’s case seemed mystified that legal officials were at all concerned about Thomas’s innocence. Regardless of whether he committed rape against her, according to white ideology, the potential was there. In her eyes, trials involving cases of black-on-white rape were never intended to achieve justice. Her statements suggest that she believed she was well within her rights as a white woman to sacrifice a black man to save her reputation. 

In 1914, Luther Tyler’s lawyer astutely noted that white men’s racial ideology granted all white women power: “A woman tells a tale, and men believe it. They believe because their passions and prejudices want them to believe and arouse them to act.”5 White women had the social power to manipulate white men through charges of rape because their accusations accorded with white men’s beliefs about black men’s innate natures and because an accusation allowed white men to exert control over the bodies of black men. Indeed, Joseph Thomas became a suspect in Risley’s rape simply because he had been arrested on another unrelated charge, perhaps one for which there was less chance of conviction. For some women, crying rape was the path of least resistance when they violated moral standards, as some white men acknowledged. Crandall Mackey speculated, with no evidence whatsoever, that Mabel Risley accused Thomas of rape to hide her own sexual relations with her intended husband. 

It was less likely that women would be accused of a false accusation at trial, though it was not impossible. When defendants or courts proved that women lied for their own illicit motives, the women faced public indignation. Dorothy Skaggs, whose case is discussed in the introduction to this book, claimed that she was hit over the head, dragged into an alley, and raped to hide her relationship with a married man. She eventually identified William Harper as her assailant; he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death. His lawyer immediately motioned for a new trial and produced numerous white witnesses who claimed that the victim was lying to hide an affair. In the face of considerable testimony suggesting that Skaggs manufactured a rape charge to hide her relationship with another man, public opinion turned against her. The defense easily raised allegations of previous drug use, as well as suggestions that she had cheated on her husband in the past, all of which appeared in the newspapers. At Harper’s second trial, he was quickly acquitted. After the trial, she and a female friend who testified on her behalf were tried for perjury.6 In the widespread publicity of the case, whites agreed that she was not a white woman worthy of protection. They not only denied her the power to accuse black men and condemned her publicly, but the legal system also sought to punish her for abusing a power reserved for respectable white women. One newspaper editor even questioned whether white women in general were sufficiently trustworthy to carry such power.7 

Not only white women used charges of rape against black men. A white community could come together and use a charge of rape to exile an unpopular black man. Henry L. Taylor claimed as much when he protested the accusations against him in 1931. He was accused of attempting to rape a young white woman on a country road. The victim, Minnie Coombs, did not see her assailant because he threw a coat over her head, but she claimed to recognize his voice. Taylor was arrested when bloodhounds tracked him to his home.8 Taylor insisted, however, that the charges were being “used as a means, or a cloak, of not only casting a shadow upon [him], causing him distress, embarrassment, and humiliation, but [also] upon his relatives, associates and friends.” Moreover, he believed that the charges, and specifically the efforts by the prosecution to have him incarcerated in a mental institution, represented a vendetta “by some he is not liked in the community in which he lives, and that there is more or less a local clamor by some parties in that community that [he] be driven from the community without cause, reason, or right; and further that this prosecution is simply a device to accomplish such purpose.”9 Taylor’s trial was beset by difficulties. The judge became ill after a day of testimony, forcing the dismissal of the jury. At a second trial, Taylor was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, the minimum prison term allowed by law. The verdict was overturned because the prosecution failed to prove that the bloodhounds were purebred, and only the tracking ability of purebred bloodhounds was admissible in court. The court declined to try Taylor again.10 Taylor reportedly died in his native Westmoreland County in 1956, so he was apparently able to resist attempts to run him out of the community. 

Whites used accusations of rape to exact revenge on blacks who may not have been guilty of rape but who had offended whites in other ways. For whites who had little access to legitimate forms of social power other than the color of their skin, in particular, accusing black men of rape served as a trump card through which they could demand the help of more elite whites and the power of the legal system to pursue their claims. Making accusations against black men also carried considerable symbolic power. It represented an attempt by marginalized whites to assert their whiteness and thereby lay claim to the privileges theoretically endowed all whites because of their race. Accusing black men of the most horrific of interracial crimes—the rape of a white woman—became a means by which non-elite whites with little social power sought to invoke the power of their race to bolster their social status. 

Elite whites, however, believed that using false accusations of rape as leverage in interracial disputes was an illegitimate use of white power and indeed also upset the social order. Leery of publicly undermining white racial solidarity, white elites usually validated poor whites’ allegations by convicting the black men they accused. But powerful whites also acknowledged when poor whites called on white solidarity to further their own individual interests by giving convicted black men short sentences or granting them pardon. These decisions did not mean that black men received justice. After all, innocent black men like Luther Tyler and Joseph Thomas spent years in prison. Instead, the decisions on the part of elites represented efforts to balance competing social hierarchies—to contain the power of poor whites to play the race card and to discourage white women from using accusations of rape to hide their own moral failings. Elites let whites who used charges of rape or assault against black men to get themselves out of tight situations know that their efforts would not always be successful and would not necessarily provide an expedient route to white respectability or social status. 

The actions of white women who made allegations of rape also concerned white men. According to them, white women of low status who cried rape used their charges to seize the privileges of whiteness that their class and sexual behavior denied them. Non-elite white women who violated the rules of segregation by engaging in sexual relationships with black men threatened white men’s patriarchal authority by flouting white men’s ability to control sexual access to women. White men contained these women by denying them full protection as white women. In response to women who cried rape, white men worked to blend racial control with class and gender control and to prevent suspect women from claiming the status promised to them by the color of their skin. In effect, white men barred some white women from using their whiteness to dictate the actions of their betters. They thus released black men accused by women who were seeking to hide consensual relationships and even ignored the claims of some white women they believed used charges of rape as means of revenge, as Calm Williams learned. 

Calm Williams was charged with the rape of a fifteen-year-old white girl in December of 1945. C. Anderson Davis, the minister of a local church, in his request to the NAACP for legal aid, wrote that the rape charge stemmed from a dispute between Williams and the alleged victim. The girl, after borrowing money from Williams to obtain a hotel room, asked him to help her procure men interested in paying her for sex. When she asked Williams for an additional fifteen dollars and he refused, she accused him of rape. According to Davis, this was not the first time she had engaged in prostitution: “The girl has a very bad record. She has been all over the country with different soldiers and has been sentenced to the state school of correction twice.” As it turned out, the NAACP’s help was unnecessary since Williams was never tried for any crime.11 Using a rape charge to punish Williams placed the girl entirely outside the bounds of white male protection, and officials ultimately disregarded her accusation. 

Cases in which women used charges of rape as leverage in other disputes reveal another aspect of interracial relations. They occurred in the context of a hidden underside to segregated southern society. Though laws strictly enforced racial separation at the public and institutional level, poor whites and blacks often interacted in their daily lives. Williams’s accuser apparently knew him well enough to enlist his aid for her work as a prostitute. Blacks and whites lived near each other, exchanged goods and commodities, socialized together, and formed intimate relationships, all in apparent contradiction to the dictates of segregation. Many of these interactions were not entirely dominated by racial hierarchy. Both parties maintained some control over their interactions. Nevertheless, when disputes arose between whites and blacks at the lower end of the social spectrum, whites sought advantage by calling for the support of elite whites. Using their racial status, poor whites could use charges of rape to enlist the help of elite whites, and the public institutions controlled by them, to maneuver for advantage or to exact revenge. Unlike in Calm Williams’s case, when disputes between these groups exploded in charges of rape, they usually resulted in conviction. Black men could spend years in prison on dubious charges, but the legal system eventually justified release because of doubts about the motives of the accusers. 

Court officials and even juries showed little sympathy for white women who accused black men to serve their own purposes. Women often received harsh censure while their male accomplices did not, as Sallie Sigman discovered when she accused Solomon Douglas of attempted rape in 1921. Sigman, a married woman living near Schoolfield, Virginia, in Pittsylvania County, charged that Douglas came to her door when her husband was not at home. “Not realizing that the caller was a negro,” she opened the door. After being informed that Sigman’s husband was away, Douglas allegedly stated, “It’s not your husband I want but you,” and he proceeded to force his way into the house. Sigman ran and got her husband’s revolver and shot Douglas twice. Douglas ran but was caught by police. Sigman identified Douglas as her assailant, noting that he “had dealings” with her husband.12 In January 1922, Douglas was indicted for attempted rape but was convicted only of misdemeanor assault. He was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $100. He appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, but his case was dismissed when he could not afford to have the transcript of his trial produced, and he was remanded to jail.13 Douglas’s acquittal for attempted rape and his minor sentence for an assault on a white woman, though not unprecedented, was surprising because Douglas was already a convicted criminal. He had previously been acquitted of murder but spent three years in prison on an unrelated conviction for attempted rape.14 Douglas was also well entrenched in the criminal culture that flourished during Prohibition, as were Percy Sigman and his wife, Sallie. Douglas argued that their criminal interaction ultimately resulted in the accusation against him. 

Prior to Sallie Sigman’s charge of rape, Percy Sigman had been arrested and charged with violating the Prohibition laws. According to the law enforcement officials who signed Douglas’s petition for pardon, “The prosecutrix and her husband had been suspected of being bootleggers by all the officers in and around Schoolfield for some time.” Solomon Douglas was one of their regular customers, and he testified at trial that he had purchased whiskey from the Sigmans on many occasions and, on the night in question, had gone to the Sigman home and purchased a pint of whiskey for two dollars. He claimed he made no attempt to rape Sallie. At this point, Sigman had been indicted, and Sallie Sigman suspected that Douglas had turned in the couple to authorities. According to Douglas’s attorney, she “saw her chance to get even with them and woman-like started this hue and cry.” The Sigmans allegedly ambushed Douglas and shot him twice and then swore out a complaint against him for attempted rape. Though Percy Sigman was acquitted of the Prohibition charges against him, his sister-in-law was arrested several days after Douglas’s trial with several gallons of whiskey in the car she was driving—a car that belonged to the Sigmans.15 Douglas’s attorney had very little sympathy for the Sigmans, and, ignoring Sallie Sigman’s race, insisted her gender only exacerbated the depravity of her actions. “It is deplorable that people of this character and especially a woman,” he said, “will resort to such low means in order to accomplish their heinous purposes.”16 

Few legal officials involved in clemency proceedings disputed the facts as they were set forth by the defense, but the facts had been presented at Douglas’s trial and considered by the jury and were reflected in the jury’s verdict and sentence. Douglas’s conviction for misdemeanor assault and his minor sentence indicated the credence that the jury placed in his account of events. Judge Richard Ker wrote the governor that he saw no reason to recommend clemency as “all questions of the credibility of the prosecuting witness [were] disposed of by the verdict of the jury.” The commonwealth’s attorney also recommended against clemency, writing, “She [Sallie Sigman] is a white woman, and both live in a community made up of negroes and whites; and a pardon to this negro would have a bad effect on other negroes.” Despite the belief of the deputy sheriff and the justice of the peace of Schoolfield that Douglas’s conviction represented a miscarriage of justice, Governor Trinkle refused to pardon him. “The question of facts was presented to the jury,” he asserted, “and I do not feel that I would be justified in overriding this verdict.” Evidently, Solomon Douglas served his sentence for assault.17 

The jury’s verdict in Solomon Douglas’s case was indeed ambiguous. Presented with evidence that Sallie Sigman’s charge grew out of a desire for revenge and her participation in criminal activities, the jury nonetheless decided to convict Douglas. Such a conviction represented the jury’s lack of comfort with the parties’ casual, if illegal, commerce across racial and gender lines. Sallie Sigman’s participation in that criminal culture and her willingness to accuse a black man of rape as a means of revenge encouraged the jury to limit the power endowed to her by her race. The decision on the part of the judge and the prosecuting attorney not to support Douglas’s petition was equally ambiguous. Declining to comment on Douglas’s allegations, the commonwealth’s attorney placed broader issues of social order over questions of justice. Douglas should not be released because that action might encourage other African Americans who lived in mixed communities. What exactly it would encourage them to do was unclear. Attack white women or engage in illegal activities across racial and gender lines? Either activity was equally destabilizing to the carefully monitored racial, gender, and class hierarchies. 

The events surrounding the Sigmans’ and Solomon Douglas’s relationship attest to the hidden culture of cross-racial and cross-gender interactions that occurred despite carefully constructed laws separating the races. The Sigmans and Douglas, and many other whites and blacks, engaged in casual commercial exchanges, dominated not by rules of white supremacy and racial domination but by the laws of supply and demand.18 Douglas and Sallie Sigman acted as equals in their exchange of money for whiskey. Sallie Sigman only resorted to the power her whiteness gave her when she believed Douglas had violated the rules surrounding their commercial exchange. She may have thought that because of her race, her accusations would not be questioned, that they represented a fool-proof means of revenge. The men composing the jury that convicted Douglas were not so cooperative. To them, her whiteness and even her gender did not carry great weight. Her gender was largely erased when Douglas was convicted of a nonsexual offense. Her class and her character, and those of her husband, overrode consideration of her race and sex. 

The rhetoric surrounding black-on-white rape insisted that all white women could call on white men and the legal system to avenge their honor. This ideology created a means by which poor women could potentially improve their status. Charging rape was a way for a woman to obscure public knowledge of her social and sexual misdeeds and to reclaim the higher ground of respectability. White women, however, found that crying rape was not always an effective means of reclaiming white status. The jury determined that Douglas’s attempted rape of Sallie Sigman was only a misdemeanor, a resounding judgment of the minimal threat her violation was to the racial hierarchy. Moreover, a final event suggests that Sallie Sigman’s charges did little to improve her status in the community. After serving his sentence, Douglas returned to Pittsylvania County. Eight years later he was charged with violating the Prohibition laws.19 He apparently felt little concern about returning to the community in which he had been convicted of assaulting a white woman. The subsequent charges lodged against him, however, suggest that he continued to live within the criminal subculture of the community. 

Charges of rape could cover a variety of misdeeds by white women, but none was so potentially damning to white women’s status as allegations of consensual sexual relations with black men. Making accusations of rape to hide interracial affairs was the most obvious way in which white women used accusations against black men to achieve their own ends. Ida B. Wells, as early as 1892, asserted that numerous lynchings grew out of white women’s efforts to mask relations with black lovers. “Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women,” she asserted. “If southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”20 Accusing black lovers of rape renarrated a white woman’s sexual indiscretion in a way that protected her respectability. The legal definition of rape negated white women’s complicity in interracial sexual relations as it simultaneously proclaimed their access to white male protection. Freed from responsibility for their actions, these women hoped to reclaim their status as the repository of white, racial purity. 

Sexual purity and chastity lay at the heart of idealized notions of white womanhood. The essence of whiteness for women was their sexual segregation from black men. To acknowledge consensual relations with a black man meant voluntarily rejecting the core of white femininity and the ultimate forfeiture of white status and privilege. Sexual relationships across the color line were so devastating to white women’s status that white men presumed women would never acknowledge them. The prosecution in Samuel Legions case in 1943 argued that the fact that the alleged victim admitted to authorities she had sexual relations with the defendant in itself proved she did not consent: “No person who was the author of her own shame would be so callous as to freely tell others about such an experience with a negro man.”21 In theory, the fear of social ostracism and humiliation would prevent white women from acknowledging they had consensual relationships with black men. One prosecutor, outraged that a convicted man had even suggested the victim consented to relations, averred that it gave “her [the victim] the worse humiliation.” Claiming she consented, regardless of whether or not she did, he continued, “would disgrace her forever in the eyes of the public.”22 

Black men, however, were usually convicted despite any rumors that a consensual relationship led to a charge of rape, especially since white women did not admit such relationships in court. There is no evidence that any case between 1900 and 1960 resulted in an acquittal after the alleged victim openly took responsibility for a sexual relationship, and no white woman pleaded with a jury to spare her black lover. For their part, black men were also reluctant to base their defense on the claim that they were engaged in consensual relationships, knowing they risked antagonizing white male jury members. In 1908, for example, Lee Strother waited until after his conviction to tell his attorney he had been having an ongoing affair with the woman who charged him with rape. Strother admitted giving false testimony on the stand because he believed basing his defense on consent would ultimately hurt his case. He reportedly told his lawyer that “if they [sic] jury had not believed him they would have hung him and if they did believe him and turn him out [acquitted him], the white folks would have killed him.”23 In most cases, the course of legal action, at least on the surface, conformed to the familiar paradigm— no sexual relationship between a white woman and a black man could ever be voluntary, and black men faced punishment for any such accusation. And, as with most actions contradictory to the rhetoric of black-on-white rape, questions about the victim’s consent usually appeared in petitions for executive clemency. 

Questions of consent remained central to all rape cases, regardless of the races of the parties involved. By defining rape as carnal relations by force and against the will of the victim, the law placed the burden of proving nonconsent on the victim. Courts required women charging rape to demonstrate they did not consent to sexual intercourse by providing evidence that they strenuously resisted the assault.24 This requirement ostensibly served to protect men from false charges. In practice, it made rape difficult to prove, protecting guilty, as well as innocent, men. It ultimately worked to give most men unfettered sexual access to most women, as long as they left few physical marks of violence to be used against them in court. The resistance requirement, however, was not so stringently applied in cases of black-on-white rape. According to twentieth-century cultural norms, especially in the South, nonwhite men had no right to sexual access to white women; therefore the law in no way sought to protect that right by placing the burden of proving rape on white women who made the accusation. Because whites assumed that white women would never consent to sexual relations with black men, white women who accused black men theoretically did not need to prove their nonconsent through resistance in court. 

Lurking fears that white women might consent to relations with black men, however, complicated these assumptions. In many cases, white women still needed to provide some evidence that they did indeed resist. Such evidence assured jurors that their assumptions about white women held true: white women viewed any sexual contact with black men as abhorrent. At the same time, it ensured that even black-on-white cases conformed to the letter of the law, preventing troublesome precedents that later might be called upon in cases when white men were accused of rape. Virginia judges thus instructed juries on the relationship between consent and resistance even in cases of black-on-white rape. 

In 1929, the judge presiding over the trial of Joe Gibbs, a black man accused of assaulting two white girls, instructed the jury that to convict Gibbs of rape, the law required that “such force is essential to the crime as may be adequate to overcome the resistance of the woman.”25 Similarly, at Charlie Brown’s trial in 1941, the jury received instructions that if the victim 

consented to sexual relations, “it will not be rape.” But the judge specified what constituted consent: “A consent induced by fear of bodily harm or personal violence is not consent, and resistance on the part of the woman is not necessary when it is dangerous and absolutely useless to resist, or that there is dread or fear of death or bodily injury on the part of the woman.”26 The judge in John Anderson’s case made the most explicit statement regarding the resistance requirement. Like the judge in Brown’s case, this judge specified that consent induced by fear did not count. But he went on to state the level of resistance required by law: “Resistance by the woman must be more than mere verbal expressions, but there must be the exercise of every means of faculty within the woman’s power to resist penetration, under the circumstances, and that the persistence in such resistance must continue until such offense is consummated.” If the jurors did not find that the victim’s resistance met this threshold, they could not find Anderson guilty of rape even though he was black. Indeed, the judge combined this instruction with the specific warning that the jury could not be influenced by the fact that Anderson was a black man accused of raping a white woman.27 

Once the law was explained to them, however, jurors could choose to apply it how they wished, and they arrived at their verdicts through the matrix of their cultural assumptions. In the cases described above, all the defendants were originally sentenced to death, suggesting that however these women responded to their assaults, the jury believed that what they did met the threshold of adequate resistance. By informing the jury of the state’s requirement of resistance, however, the court worked to uphold important precedents about patriarchal privilege that also informed intra-racial cases. Determining whether the victim displayed adequate resistance was left to the jurors, who ultimately judged whether a woman had resisted by “every means of faculty within the [her] power,” regardless of the race of the assailant. 

For females under the age of consent, however, the law presumed that they did not have the maturity to give consent to sexual relations with any man, let alone African Americans, so whether or not they resisted was moot. In Paul Hairston’s case, the instructions to the jury suggest that he claimed that his victim, a white fourteen-year-old girl, had consented to his advances. The judge instructed the jury twice that any consent on her part was irrelevant, since she was underage and therefore could not legally give her consent. Whether or not the defendant believed she was above the age of consent was also of no relevance.28 Nevertheless, courts did not assume that all white women, especially those under the age of consent, were innocent victims of black men’s designs. J. R. H. Alexander, the prosecutor in James Washington’s rape case, wrote the governor that it was routine to investigate the reputation and credibility of rape victims even when they were below the age of consent. “I would 

naturally investigate her reputation,” he asserted, “and I did not hear a breath against her.” Only later did he point out that “[i]n any event, the girl is only fourteen years old so that his statement [suggesting consensual relations] does not in any way help his plight.”29 He penned this note on legal procedure after Washington’s father suggested that the charge against Washington grew out of an ongoing consensual relationship.30 Even in cases in which white girls accused black men of sexual violence, and even in cases in which the law stated that consent and character should have no relevance in questions of guilt or innocence, legal officials nonetheless considered the possibility of consent when they debated black men’s fates. They also realized that even though the issue of consent might have no legal relevance, it nonetheless remained a factor jurors would likely consider. Consensual relations between black men and white women, in white men’s minds, were real possibilities despite the rhetoric to the contrary. Consequently, legal officials approached all rape victims with a degree of distrust. 

Questions about the victim’s consent were not confined to the victim and her alleged assailant, however. Courts confronted whether husbands or fathers who controlled sexual access to their white wives and daughters could consent to sexual relations for them. Randolph Hockaday, a black man, was convicted of attempted rape in 1937 after his drinking partner, Clarence Branch, a white man, exchanged sexual access to his daughter for whiskey and then held her down to allow Hockaday to have sex with her. Branch, however, was convicted of attempted rape as well, and both men received sentences of life in prison.31 Similarly, in 1952, a white husband tried to force his wife into sexual relations with their black gardener. Both men were indicted, but the judge later dismissed the charges when the wife recanted her statement to police. She was arrested for making a false statement.32 Clarence Branch, and possibly others as well, apparently believed they were exercising their patriarchal privileges, one of which, under common law, was sexual property rights over female family members, an understanding the state recognized when it solicited the opinions of husbands and fathers rather than of victims themselves in pardon considerations. The courts, however, limited the extent to which white men controlled women’s sexual lives. In a segregated society, white women’s sexuality had important public implications. Upholding the color line by preventing sexual interaction between white women and black men outweighed white men’s patriarchal right to control sexual access to their female kin.33 

Despite white assumptions, white women did consent to sexual relations with black men. It is clear that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white prostitutes in Richmond “secretly sold their favors to colored men.”34 The opinion of the Supreme Court of Alabama in overturning the verdict of a black man convicted of raping a white prostitute conceded that white prostitutes did service black men, though the court hoped only rarely. In Georgia, saloons for drinking, gambling, and prostitution were frequently interracial.35 Wilson Allen and John Boone’s petitions for clemency, discussed in Chapter 4, revolved around allegations that their alleged victims were prostitutes. In all of these instances, white women apparently consented to sex with black men for economic reasons, if not out of desire. 

Other evidence suggests that consensual relationships did not always involve prostitution. Melton A. McLaurin, in his memoir of growing up in the segregated South, wrote that consensual relationships between white women and black men were common knowledge in southern communities.36 In Virginia in the 1920s, activists concerned with promoting the purity of the white race convinced the Virginia General Assembly to pass laws strengthening prohibitions on interracial marriage. As part of activists’ efforts to improve the law, they provided what they believed to be evidence documenting that sexual relationships between white women and black men continued without any interference from local authorities or the public.37 White authorities clearly did not intervene in all instances of sexual relations between white women and black men. Many relationships continued without community interference, even if they were common knowledge among whites. Whites’ willful blindness helped resolve the conundrum of consent: that white women supposedly would never consent to sex with black men yet frequently did. Ignoring these relationships denied their existence. Whites’ insistence that the cases that were publicly exposed only involved low-status white women, in turn, confirmed that the definition of true white women indicated middle-class respectability. As their sexual relationships with blacks attested, white women at the lower end of the social and economic spectrum were less white, having reduced themselves to the level of blacks. 

Although any sexual relationship between a white woman and a black man could be potentially explosive, evidence from cases that did spur legal intervention indicates that communities occasionally moderated their responses. Though no Virginia community openly advocated sexual relations across racial lines—indeed, all southern states had laws explicitly prohibiting interracial marriage—when cross-racial relationships came to light, they did not always result in rape charges. Loo Rooster Jarvis received a life sentence after he was twice accused of having sex with a white woman. Legal officials acknowledged that his first violation might have involved an ongoing sexual relationship with a white woman. When that first relationship came to the attention of authorities, they placed Jarvis in Central State Hospital and sterilized him rather than convicting him of a crime. In 1941, Leewood Ashby was not charged with rape for his relationship with a white woman, but he was convicted of the more ambiguous charge of “carnal knowledge of a white woman.” He was sentenced to three years in prison and fined, but he was granted a conditional pardon a year early.38 White communities policed these relationships, but they did not consider them rapes. 

Evidence suggests that communities brought consensual interracial sexual relationships to the attention of authorities when the participants violated other community moral standards. Jacob Duncan, for example, was arrested in 1927 for an assault on a young girl. Danville officer Ira Harris initiated the proceedings after reporting that he had seen Duncan “lure the girl from her home to his dwelling.”39 The Danville Register reported that “[r]esidents of the neighborhood in which the girl lived had seen her with the Negro man and had grown suspicious.” After his arrest, police removed Duncan to Lynchburg because they feared mob violence.40 The role of the victim, who was under the age of consent, remained shadowy. The newspaper merely stated that “the girl was taken to police headquarters where she made a statement which, police say, support the charge,” suggesting that she did not make her accusation entirely willingly.41 In September, Duncan pleaded guilty to rape, insisting that his plea was not an admission of guilt but rather a means of avoiding the death penalty. He was sentenced to eighteen years in prison.42 

Four years later, Duncan’s wife began to petition the governor to release her husband. She vaguely referred to the details of Duncan’s alleged crime (“It was concerning a white girl being at his home”) and focused instead on her need for Duncan’s financial support.43 The governor, however, refused to grant Duncan a pardon. John W. Carter, the prosecutor in the case, saw “no reason in the world why parole should be granted at the present time.” From the tone of Carter’s letter, time had not diminished his feelings of outrage regarding the case.44 The chief of police, J. H. Martin, concurred with Carter’s assessment. According to Martin, Duncan was “a notorious character” and “was unable to hold a job because of his lazy and shiftless habits.” The circumstances of Duncan’s arrest most incensed Martin: “He had this girl come to his house several times each week until the entire neighborhood was scandalized. He was caught in the very act one night by Lieutenant I. H. Harris of this department, who had been watching his house.”45 Martin’s letter suggests that Duncan’s relationship with the unnamed white girl was common knowledge in the community, and indeed, Duncan and his lover did very little to hide it. Only over time did the sensibilities of the neighborhood become inflamed. Duncan’s crime, then, was not merely having engaged in the relationship, but also the manner in which he and the girl conducted it: brazenly, frequently, and with little concern for discretion. In white male officials’ view, Duncan had no regard for the color line, or a related gender line, and he flouted both repeatedly with a white minor. 

White women’s illicit relationships with black men negated their role as the repository of white virtue and honor, undermined white men’s sexual control over white women, and potentially threatened the racial hierarchy by compromising white racial purity. Some white women apparently were unconcerned about their lost status. Others took great care to hide their relationships and called them rape when they feared exposure. For these women, public exposure came at an intolerable social cost, though not so intolerable as to forego the relationship in the first place.46 These white women resorted to the only form of power they had when the long reach of southern social norms, steeped in racism, tradition, and patriarchy, appeared ready to call them to account. Their actions are understandable, though they are not forgivable, since they traded black men’s lives for their own reputations. Crying rape, however, did not always shield white women from the full consequences of their actions. In an effort to constrain their efforts, white men could become the allies of accused black men, united as men against women’s power to accuse them of rape. 

As with issues of character, allegations that a relationship was consensual rarely were made at trial. Most appeared in petitions for clemency, away from open public debate and usually long after any furor caused by the assault had dissipated. As in the case of the victim’s character, white juries usually voted to convict accused men as a tangible representation of their duty to protect all white women, even if the relationship was consensual and known throughout the white community. Only after whites could say the law had taken its course and they had defended white women’s honor did whites balance the need to affirm the racial hierarchy with the need to address white women’s own failings and shore up masculine privilege. 

Charles Wilson, for example, was convicted of rape in 1904 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Eleven years later, he appealed to the governor for executive clemency. The commonwealth’s attorney recommended that the governor grant Wilson’s request, stating that the white woman who made the charge “was not of the best reputation.”47 The presiding judge in Wilson’s trial advocated his release more forcefully, placing responsibility for it on the female victim, whom he argued engaged in inappropriate relations with African American men. Wilson’s conviction, he argued, “depended almost entirely on the statement of the prosecutrix, a white woman who was admittedly on intimate social terms with this man and other negroes in the neighborhood, and I am informed that since Charles Wilson’s conviction of an attempt to commit rape, she has continued the association. A strong suspicion existed at the time that the charge was made to cloak the woman’s own lewdness.”48 Wilson was released scarcely two weeks after Judge Tyler penned his recommendation. 

The judge’s statements suggest that the accusation represented a strategy by which the alleged victim hoped to reassert her white womanhood and claim its privileges despite her social and sexual misdeeds. As a woman whose skin was white, despite her tarnished reputation, she retained considerable power. Charles Wilson served eleven years for a rape that, in the opinion of legal authorities, may never have occurred. However, local knowledge of her reputation and her racial transgressions limited the protection such a woman could claim. Although Wilson would be punished, he would not pay with his life. Releasing him from prison, perhaps to return to the community, warned white women of the consequences of inappropriate relations across the color line, regardless of whether or not an assault occurred.49 

White men acknowledged that even black men were at the mercy of women, because they, like white men, could be falsely accused of rape. Black men who engaged in affairs with disreputable, unscrupulous white women were most at peril; these women, whites believed, were most likely to engage in sexual relations with black men and most likely to stoop to making false accusations in an attempt to salvage their reputations. Nevertheless, at least initially, their accusations still commanded white men’s response. Not all black men, however, were equally guilty in the eyes of white men. When black men engaged in affairs with a certain amount of discretion, or with some evidence of reluctance, white men might acknowledge their common gender interests with black men, and extend their support to black men as men. Indeed, white men could sympathize with black men who were victimized by desperate white women. 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Paul Washington was arrested for rape on August 16, 1925. The victim was Della Payne, a married woman who, at the time of the assault, was separated from her husband and working as a housekeeper for a bedridden elderly man. She claimed that Washington broke into the house of her employer during the night and assaulted her. She reported the assault the next morning and named Washington as her assailant. When questioned by police at his home, Washington denied committing the assault and insisted that he had been in bed sleeping the entire night with his wife, who corroborated his statement. Circumstantial evidence at Washington’s home, however, contradicted both of their stories. At the time of the alleged assault, it had been raining heavily, and police found a set of Washington’s clothes soaking wet and hanging to dry at his home. His wet clothes led police to believe that Washington had been out in the rain the previous night, and they arrested him for Payne’s rape.50 

A jury found Washington guilty and sentenced him to life in prison. Efforts to have the judge set aside the verdict failed, and Washington was incarcerated.51 Several years later, Washington petitioned the governor for conditional pardon with the support of the sheriff and the commonwealth’s attorney who originally arrested, prosecuted, and convicted him. When Washington wrote the sheriff to ask for his help in getting the sentence reduced, the sheriff replied that he believed Washington was innocent and should not be in prison at all. His own investigation, he believed, cleared Washington of all charges.52 

The sheriff wrote to Governor Pollard’s secretary regarding Washington’s petition for clemency in October 1932. His letter addressed his concerns about Washington’s conviction at length. One of the most damning pieces of evidence against Washington was that his shoes matched prints found at the scene of the crime. Washington’s shoes were very distinctive: three nails in the heel left a unique imprint. Payne had testified that Washington entered through the window in the back room of the house where she was sleeping, committed the assault, and left without walking through other areas of the house. According to the sheriff, however, the marks made by his shoes suggested he was familiar with the house: 

In tracing these nail prints one could easily see that Washington had been a frequent visitor to the Payne home and that he had worn these shoes on many visits there, as these prints were in all the rooms in the house and on the two porches, front and back. One other thing was very plain: that Washington had made many trips from the room which was claimed he entered and which was the kitchen of the house through the room in which Mrs. Payne claimed she slept and used as a bed room to the third room and bed side of the invalid man showing conclusively in my judgment, that he had frequently taken the invalid food and water. 

Washington had been in the house many times and “was invited there and encouraged to be there by Mrs. Della Payne.”53 His footprints were also found “even under the table in the kitchen . . . the imprints under the kitchen table indicated that the wearer of that shoe had eaten meals at that table.”54 Payne not only had sex with Washington but had violated other cardinal rules of segregation as well. 

At the time, the footprints concerned Sheriff Dyche enough to question Washington about them after the jury returned with its verdict. Washington admitted that he had been a frequent visitor to Payne’s house. By the time the sheriff discovered this, Payne had left Virginia. She was gone for several years, and the sheriff was apparently (or perhaps conveniently) unable to locate her to question her about her relationship with Washington until immediately prior to Washington’s petition. During his interview with Payne, the sheriff “accused her of carrying on an illicit affair with Paul Washington. She broke down and cried, but would not at any time deny the accusation nor did she affirm the accusation. All that she would say was, ‘I would be afraid for Washington to be released for fear he might attack me,’ which is a very slim excuse.”55 

When faced with the sheriff’s accusations, Della Payne found herself in an untenable situation. If she had carried on an affair with Washington, her testimony in court would constitute perjury. Indeed, the year before in Norfolk, as discussed earlier in this chapter, Dorothy Skaggs had been convicted of perjury for falsely accusing a black man named William Harper of rape. That case had received significant press coverage throughout the state, and it is possible that Payne worried she would face similar charges. Washington’s release would likely worry her—either her rapist was free, or the man she falsely accused might seek revenge. The sheriff had his own theories. He was sure “she would like to admit the truth,” he asserted, “but I am afraid she will never do so for the reason that she would not want to admit having such conduct with a colored man and would rather see him spend his days in the penitentiary, although innocent, than to suffer that disgrace.”56 

Payne had another more pressing reason for accusing Washington. According to the sheriff, she separated from her husband “something like a year just before the trial . . . ; he refused to attend the trial or to take any interest in the case, though [the prosecutor] made efforts to get him to do so, urging him, for the sake of appearances at least, to attend the trial.” Sheriff Dyche wrote that Washington was held in the Allegheny County jail for over six months before he was brought to trial because Payne was pregnant. This delay suggests that authorities at least considered the possibility that the charge of rape grew out of a preexisting consensual relationship. The baby would expose Payne’s affair and reveal that her lover was black. “Of course,” the sheriff continued, “being a married woman and having a white husband, the fear came over her that the unborn child might be black and she connived the scheme of rape accusing Paul Washington because he was about to break with her, thereby preparing to ‘kill two birds with one stone.’” After the birth of the child, the sheriff visited Payne’s home. He “found that the child was white.”57 Sheriff Dyche believed that Paul Washington was the victim of a scheming woman who used a charge of rape to explain the birth of what she feared would be a mixed-race child. “Mrs. Payne claimed that Paul Washington made only one trip to her house. That statement is untrue and, if that is untrue, any statement she made concerning this case is liable to be just as untrue.”58 The prosecuting attorney, when asked by the governor, also recommended that Washington receive a conditional pardon.59 

With hindsight, of course, one can understand Washington’s reluctance to reveal the nature of his relationship with Della Payne. Though nowhere does any news report mention that the communities of Covington and Clifton Forge were outraged by the assault, Washington felt himself in a precarious position. Washington’s confession to the sheriff also revealed why, beyond her pregnancy, Payne made her accusation when she did. According to Washington, their affair had been going on for over a year, perhaps even before she separated from her husband. Washington admitted that he did indeed travel to Payne’s home on the night in question and did have consensual sexual relations with her. But on that night he told her he was breaking off their affair, that “he had become afraid that their relations were going to be found out, that he would be punished, and that he was not going to have any further relations with her.” She went the next morning to her father and accused Washington of rape.60 

Paul Washington was released from prison in April 1933, after spending seven years in prison for engaging in a consensual sexual relationship with a white woman. Ultimately, court officials and the governor believed Washington’s version of events over Payne’s, despite the fact that she never changed her story. Her cry of rape lends credence to arguments that any white woman could successfully accuse a black man of rape regardless of the quality of the physical evidence. When she found herself scorned, pregnant, and alone, she was able to call upon the formal authority of the state to press her claim for innocence and respectability. But her actions, when revealed by the sheriff, placed her in a more untenable category. She was scorned, rejected by a black man, and desperate, and she had lied. The role of the woman scorned was one that all men, white or black, recognized and feared. Her motives for naming Washington for rape created an alliance between a black man and the white authorities who were supposed to protect white women. Paul Washington was a man wronged by a desperate woman; he was no longer solely identified by his blackness. She lost the cloak of chivalry she had claimed because of her whiteness. 

Sympathy for Washington grew out of a common fear of false accusations of rape by vindictive women who illegitimately manipulated their sexual power to exert control over men, the community, and their own situations. Washington’s advocates acknowledged that Della Payne’s position, being pregnant and separated from her husband, caused her to “cry rape” in order to save her reputation. White women’s accusations demanded that white men take action, and white men usually complied. But when women used their power to shield themselves from the consequences of their moral failings, white men abandoned racial solidarity. Indeed, once Washington served what whites believed to be an appropriate sentence, they rallied to his support. 

The plight of John Spencer, another black man accused of rape, also created an alliance between him and white male supporters in his community. In his case, however, that alliance did not pivot around a common fear of women. Rather, it revolved around men’s common sexual desire for women. In Spencer’s case, the desire on the part of a black man for a white woman did not elicit white hysteria, violence, or the rhetoric of protecting white women. Instead, it operated as a catalyst for his release. 

Spencer was tried and convicted of rape in Page County in October 1919. The woman who accused him was Cora Sours, an eighteen-year-old, unmarried, white woman. Spencer’s conviction occurred without much fanfare. The court records are sparse, and evidently, his trial was quick and without incident. The assault itself never received news coverage, and there is no evidence that reports of an assault on a white woman by a black man caused any expressions of outrage in the community. Spencer, a fifty-one-year-old married laborer, was sentenced to the minimum term of five years in prison.61 

In November 1920, Spencer’s attorney, R. S. Parks, wrote to the governor requesting Spencer’s release. He enclosed a petition signed by eight other white men, including a lawyer, a doctor, an insurance salesman, a newspaper editor, and a local merchant, from the community. In their petition, the men contended that Spencer was only guilty of adultery. Spencer, according to the petition, had “always been regarded as an honest well behaved colored man, knowing his place and attending to his own business.” For several years, he had worked as a driver, hauling supplies in a horse and wagon from the town of Luray to Skyland, a summer resort nearby. Cora Sours lived along his route, and “she would come out to the road and get on the wagon and ride back and forth with him. . . . [S]he was seen with her arm around him and in other ways showed her intimacy or fondness for the man.”62 At no point in the trial did Spencer deny that sexual intercourse had occurred between Sours and himself. At issue was whether that intercourse constituted rape. 

The existing clemency files do not indicate whether Spencer attempted to use his relationship with Sours as his defense. Nor does the file reveal why the case came to the attention of the authorities, though there are several possible reasons. Cora Sours, knowing that her relationship with Spencer was causing community comment, may have made the charge to save her reputation. Her family may have made the accusation for her to save their reputation. Neither the letter from Spencer’s attorney nor the petition on his behalf discussed the reputation of the victim or her family. Cora Sours never married in Page County. Census records, however, show that Sours’s family worked as farm laborers, and several women named Sours worked as domestic servants in white households, so she likely came from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Sours’s presence in Spencer’s wagon on a public road, however, suggests that she was not concerned about being seen showing affection for a black man. The charge could have arisen, as it did in the Jacob Duncan case, from community intolerance. After turning a blind eye to Spencer and Sours’s relationship, the community may have reached the end of its toleration. The couple may have been too brazen or may have met too frequently, or the community may have been interested in sending a message to the African American community to deter any other black men from similar actions. This last explanation seems to have the most supporting evidence. Both the letter from Spencer’s attorney and the petition insisted that any deterrent effect had been accomplished. 

Regardless of who charged him, Spencer received a sentence of five years and soon found himself with a cohort of white men pleading his cause. The signers of the petition did not believe that Spencer’s actions threatened existing racial hierarchies. The focus of their argument was that Spencer had done no more than any man would have done, and they did not believe that Spencer should suffer additional punishment because he had succumbed to temptation. They, as men, sympathized with Spencer’s desire. The fact that his desire was for a white woman did not materially change the case, other than causing a guilty verdict where none otherwise would have occurred. According to Parks, Spencer’s temptation was certainly increased by the fact that Cora Sours was white, but that only made his eventual capitulation to that desire the more understandable: “That the man was guilty of violation of law, in that he had time and again had sexual intercourse with the woman was not denied by him but admitted, and the [ev]idence clearly showed that she visited the negro, rode up and down the road with him with her arms around him and threw herself in his way and he took what was thrown at him, as many mwn [sic] would have done, especially a negro man would feel himself complimented and ivited [invited?] by a woman of a different and superior race.”63 The petition signed by the community echoed Park’s assertions: “We did not believe then and we do not believe now that rape was committed and the man only did what others might have done, take what was offered and thrown at him.”64 Spencer, after all, was a man. He could hardly be blamed for accepting the attentions of a young woman. 

At the time of the trial, Parks had asked the court to set aside the verdict as contrary to the evidence, but the court declined to do so. The judge refused to set aside a verdict just because he did not agree with it, telling Parks that he thought “it better to let the verdict stand, as there was admission of adultery, and it would serve as a deterrent to other negroes not to interfere with white women.”65 Through the actions of the jury, the Luray community had completed its duty to protect segregation, for which white women were merely the proxy. But their verdict was not an unqualified endorsement of the victim’s testimony. The short sentence, the minimum allowed for a conviction, underscored the jury’s misgivings. Moreover, it allowed the court officials to step in after the message had been sent to the black community. Luray whites would convict black men for engaging in affairs with white women. White men, however, in consideration of the temptations of sex, would adjust the verdict according to their understanding of Spencer’s offense. Conviction gave a nod to conventional ideology and rhetoric. Spencer’s pardon gave a nudge and a wink to black men as men. All men felt the temptations of the flesh in the presence of a willing and insistent woman. All men might stand together to let a man, even a black one, off the hook for succumbing to their natural desires. 

Both Washington’s and Spencer’s actions in the case mitigated their offenses. Washington, realizing he was violating racial rules, sought to end his affair. He showed proper respect for the consequences of his actions. Spencer was an older African American man who had always known his place. More important, both were in situations with which white men could sympathize and indeed in which they could envision themselves. Few men could resist a woman who threw herself at him—certainly one whose reputation in the community may already have been tarnished. All men knew the fear that a woman might accuse them of rape to serve her own purposes. In both cases, they acknowledged the need to protect white women from black men, but as soon as they could, they adjusted the sentences to reflect more accurately their “crimes.” 

These two cases also attest to official efforts men made to police personal relationships that did not conform to the public mandates of segregation. Black men who visibly flouted the dictates of racial separation opened themselves to charges. Their punishments served as warnings to all African Americans that white women were off limits, even when the women themselves were willing participants or perhaps even aggressors. Black men’s convictions confirm the belief that interracial sexual relationships represented a violation of southern social norms and compromised the racial hierarchy. Juries did their duty by at least appearing to protect white womanhood and to punish black men’s offenses. But their protection was qualified, and light sentences and community support for early release speaks to their ambivalence. Short sentences reflected white men’s understanding of black men’s vulnerability, white men’s distrust of white women’s truthfulness, and white women’s ability to manipulate white men’s actions through accusations of rape. White men felt compelled to convict black men, but they also acted to limit the havoc accusations of unscrupulous women could wreak on the lives of African American men. 

This, in essence, was the conundrum of consent: the ideological impossibility of white women’s consent to sexual relations with black men amidst numerous instances of that very thing. White women were the highest symbol of white civilization and the guardians of racial purity, yet they were simultaneously untrustworthy, irrational, and at times, even willing partners in illegal sex with black men. In acting on white women’s invitations, black men violated their duty to the racial hierarchy and thus ensured their convictions in court. White authorities through the courts demonstrated their expectation that black men must at all times sublimate their innate desire for white women and resist temptation, especially in the face of a willing and insistent white woman. In the face of some white women’s inadequate racial pride, it thus became the responsibility of black men to protect and uphold white women’s purity and virtue, as well as the color line itself. Although whites frequently compromised their racial status, it was up to blacks to defend it, thereby preventing “no-count” whites from challenging the supposedly self­evident validity of white superiority.”66 It was black men, then, who were required to restore the racial hierarchy, and protect white men’s prerogative to have sole sexual access to white women. 

Some white women accused black men of assault to get themselves out of compromising situations and prevent public discovery of their moral transgressions. This fear of discovery was uniquely female, and, because of a racialized double standard, similar moral indiscretions would not have threatened the reputation of white men. White women’s reputations comprised the currency of their social status, and the loss of that reputation could very well mean the loss of their livelihoods, their marriages, and the sources of their material support. Indeed, in response to a friend who asked Dorothy Skaggs why she was willing to risk the life of an innocent man, she apparently replied, “I couldn’t afford to lose my husband over this.”67 Her concerns did not center on her fear of divorce but rather upon losing the money her husband sent her every month, which was her primary means of support. Faced with such a loss, it is perhaps not surprising that some white women called on one of the few socially accepted forms of power they possessed in a patriarchal and segregated society: the power to shift responsibility for their own misdeeds to the shoulders of black men, either men they knew intimately or anonymous strangers. Their actions carried grave consequences for black men, some of whom, like Lee Strother, lost their lives. 

Yet women’s efforts to save their reputations often resulted in unforeseen consequences. Some accusing white women apparently suffered pangs of guilt for false accusations. Governor Tuck received an anonymous letter in 1946 claiming to be from the white woman who had accused Fred Butler of rape in 1945. Telling the governor that she accused Butler “to save my name,” she begged that he be released. “I cannot sleep or be at rest for the great wrong and injustice I did to a colored man who is serving a life sentence on account of the lies I told which [are] all untrue.”68 When Della Payne was confronted by the sheriff about her relationship with her former lover, Paul Washington, she refused to say a word but cried bitterly and profusely. Her actions forced her to leave the state but perhaps also left her consumed by guilt. They surely spelled the end of an affair she had wanted to continue when she made her accusation. Dorothy Skaggs and her husband also vowed to leave Virginia once their legal troubles concluded, so overwhelming was the negative publicity surrounding her actions.69 In the midst of Skaggs’s perjury trial, one newspaper editor went so far as to suggest that the law should be amended to insist that women provide corroborative evidence for claims of rape.70 The dishonesty of a few accusing women threatened the perceived integrity of all accusing women. Accusing a black man of rape may have seemed a logical strategy to solve white women’s immediate problems, but it simultaneously created others. 

White tolerance for some interracial relationships refines historical understanding of sexuality and white womanhood in the segregated South. The only sexual relationships that represented an open threat to white supremacy were those perpetrated against women who were the paragons of white womanhood. In trials involving black-on-white rape accusations, white men punished black men who attempted to seize white patriarchal privilege. Whites presumed that trials, like lynchings, served as a deterrent to other black men who might consider similar actions. They showed black men the possible consequences of any relationship with a white woman and reiterated black men’s duty to protect white supremacy, even if white women would not. 

The cases described in this chapter also suggest, however, that legal authorities were concerned about more than black men who transgressed racial boundaries. Many white women’s conduct was also troubling. These women were different from the white women extolled in racist rhetoric about black beast rapists; they were less worthy of protection. Indeed, they were less white. Lowering themselves socially and sexually to what whites insisted was the level of blacks effectively erased the racial hierarchy and exposed the lie at the heart of white supremacy. African American men had to be controlled as a means of containing errant white women whose own actions upended the social order. Black men risked incarceration for failing to help marginal whites act their part, for, in essence, enabling whites to erode claims to white superiority. At the same time, short sentences and conditional pardons reminded poor whites, and especially white women, of the consequences of their own transgressions and reinforced elite white men’s power to police both white women’s and black men’s conduct. 

The willingness of white men to grant black men the benefit of the doubt worked to balance the prerogatives of race, gender, and class in the Jim Crow South. Questioning the claims of tarnished white women who cried rape lent a degree of credibility to the legal system, assuring the community—both white and black—that, for the most part, only truly egregious violations of racial norms received the most severe sanctions. It also allowed white men to check the power given to white women because of their race. A woman’s whiteness did not entitle her to undisputed power over black men; nor did it grant her the unconditional power to command white men to fulfill their promise of protection. More important, in limiting the degree of protection some women received, white men preserved their power to act as the final arbiters of not only white women’s behavior but also the ideal of white womanhood, an ideal that permeated every aspect of white women’s lives. The occasional willingness on the part of white, male juries to acquit black men accused of raping white women, and the decisions by legal authorities to release convicted black men long before they completed their sentences, might seem to undermine white supremacy. In reality, decisions that appeared to favor black men reinforced a social order structured on more than racial hierarchy. They affirmed a system of power in which hierarchies of race, gender, and class worked together. Southern social structure relied not only on white domination but also on the subservience of women at all levels of society. Granting some black men reprieve ultimately reinforced all white women’s obligation to obey.71

Chapter 5 of "White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960" examines how white women wielded sexual assault accusations as tools of racial and social manipulation. These false accusations often stemmed from their efforts to mask their own social or sexual indiscretions, leveraging prevalent stereotypes about black men as rapists. High-profile cases, such as those of Joseph Thomas, Luther Tyler, and Calm Williams, illustrate how allegations were used to address personal grievances, exact revenge, or navigate interpersonal conflicts, often dragging innocent black men into legal battles characterized by dubious evidence and racial bias.

The paradox of segregation granted white women social power through their ability to accuse black men, but this power was frequently abused, challenging the perceived purity of white female virtue. White men's reactions varied; they initially supported these accusations but often pivoted when allegations of women's duplicitous behavior surfaced, leading to reduced sentences or pardons for the accused black men. These dynamics highlighted white men’s concerns over the misuse of racial and patriarchal power and revealed underlying fears about white women’s consent in interracial sexual relations.

Cases also show that poor whites and marginalized communities sometimes manipulated rape accusations for personal advantage, signaling a complex interplay between race, gender, and class within the legal and social frameworks of Jim Crow South. Thus, the chapter underscores the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of race relations, power dynamics, and gender roles in the early-to-mid 20th century Virginia.