David Rose - Violation - Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South

Told of Jean Dimenstein’s murder while he was attending Sunday worship, Columbus’s Mayor, Jack Mickle, addressed reporters on her lawn, ringed by ten police cars. ‘We’ve got a maniac,’ he said. ‘I hope we get this guy. We gotta get this guy.’

The police had not been slow to notice that the cars belonging to both of the victims were found abandoned in Carver Heights, a black district on the southern side of Macon Road. Having examined the crime scenes and bodies, Donald Kilgore supported the CPD’s growing suspicion that the strangler was black. Later, he told reporters he had looked under the microscope at pubic hairs left at the crime scenes, and in his view, being black and curly, they displayed ‘Negroid characteristics’. In the Deep South of the United States, this was not an incidental matter.

In 1941 the Southern writer Wilbur J. Cash diagnosed what he termed the ‘Southern rape complex’, a social neurosis that originated long before the Civil War, and that continued to dominate whites’ approach to race relations for many decades afterwards. In the collective mind of the South, Cash argued, white women’s status was exalted to a bizarre and extraordinary degree, while their virtue was seen as at constant risk from the marauding, violating power of black sexuality. In part, he suggested, this was the product of guilt on the part of white male slave-owners at their own numerous illicit relationships with slave women, who often gave birth to mixed-race, light-skinned children. Soiled and shamed by their own desires and their inability to restrain them, white men projected an image of pristine chastity onto their wives and daughters, while assuming that black males must inevitably share their own lust for erotic miscegenation. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, writes Cash, ‘she was the South’s Palladium, the Southern woman – the shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds, the standard for its rallying, the mystic symbol of the nationality in the face of the foe … Merely to mention her was to send strong men into tears – or shouts.’

Columbus shared this dangerous fantasy. It could be found in purest form at the climax of Mrs Chas. Williams’s 1866 appeal on behalf of the city’s Soldiers’ Aid Society to newspapers and other kindred spirits that heralded the start of Confederate Memorial Day. In rousing, heartfelt language, Mrs Williams had claimed that the need to safeguard white female honour provided the noblest justification of all for the deaths of so many Southern men in pursuit of the doomed Lost Cause:

The proud banner under which they rallied in defence of the holiest and noblest cause for which heroes fought, or trusting woman prayed, has been furled forever. The country for which they suffered and died has now no name or place among the nations of the earth. Legislative enactments may not be made to do honour to their memories, but the veriest radical that ever traced his genealogy back to the Mayflower could not refuse thus the simple privilege of paying honour to those who died defending the life, honour and happiness of the Southern women.

After the South’s defeat, the slaves’ emancipation posed a new and terrible threat. Before the war, men such as Georgia’s Governor Brown had warned that if the slaves were freed, they would soon be asking for white women’s hands in marriage. Now that day had come to pass. In the summer of 1865, writes Nancy Telfair in her history of Columbus, ‘white women could not go alone on the streets’. The reason was that they were filled by black former slaves. As W.J. Cash put it, by ‘destroying the rigid fixity of the black at the bottom of the scale, in throwing open to him at least the legal opportunity to advance’, the abolition of slavery opened up a fearful vista in the mind of every Southerner. A war had been fought and lost to preserve white female honour. Though defeated, the white Southern male must fight still harder to protect it in time of peace. ‘Such,’ writes Cash, ‘is the explanation of the fact that from the beginning, they justified – and sincerely justified – violence towards the Negro as demanded in defence of women.’

Cash, of course, was white. African-Americans had noticed the effects of this rape complex long before his book was published in 1941. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the black activist writers Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. du Bois revealed how spurious rape allegations were used time and again by Southern whites to justify the wave of lynching, then at its terrible peak. Du Bois began his campaign when he investigated the torture and killing of Sam Hose in 1897 near Newnan, Georgia, a small farming town between Atlanta and Columbus. Hose, a farm labourer, had killed his employer, Alfred Crawford, in the course of a fight that started when he complained that he had not been paid his wages. When Hose disappeared, the local newspapers claimed he had also raped Crawford’s wife, Mattie, described before her marriage as ‘one of the belles of Newnan’. As vigilantes mounted a state-wide manhunt, the Newnan Herald and Advertiser warned the authorities not to interfere with the summary justice that must surely follow. Hose, it said, must be ‘made to suffer the torments of the damned in expiation of his hellish crime’, to demonstrate to all ‘that there is protection in Georgia for women and children’.

After his arrest near Marshallville, seventy-five miles to the south-east, Hose was transported to Newnan, where his death was deliberately delayed in order to magnify its spectacle. In front of a crowd of four thousand, many of whom had arrived aboard special trains from Atlanta, the mob slowly tortured him by slicing off his ears, nose, fingers and genitals, then burnt him at the stake. Already covered in blood, he was heard to cry ‘Sweet Jesus’ as the smoke entered his nose, eyes and mouth, and the flames roasted his legs; in a final, desperate struggle to break the chain which bound his chest, he burst a blood vessel in his neck.

Although an attempt had been made to get Mattie Crawford to identify Hose as her supposed rapist, she did not do so, and it seems improbable that she was raped at all. Du Bois commented: ‘Everyone that read the facts of the case knew perfectly well what had happened. The man wouldn’t pay him, so they got into a fight, and the man got killed – then, in order to rouse the neighbourhood to find this man, they brought in the charge of rape.’

The orator and writer Frederick Douglass, a former slave and arguably the greatest chronicler of the black experience of Emancipation and its aftermath, saw how the effects of bogus rape claims spread far beyond the places and people they directly involved. In the last speech of his life, delivered in Washington in January 1894, he argued that white propaganda about rape by blacks had become a device to justify their continued subjugation. ‘A white man has but to blacken his face and commit a crime, to have some negro lynched in his stead. An abandoned woman has only to start the cry that she has been insulted by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily murdered by the mob.’ Douglass quoted the recent words of Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: ‘The coloured race multiplies like locusts in Egypt. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof tree.’

The truth, Douglass pointed out, was that when most of the South’s white men had been away at the war, their women went unmolested. There was simply no substance to this ‘horrible and hell-black charge of rape as the peculiar crime of the coloured people of the South’. But its unchallenged prevalence in white society had terrible consequences, not only for the victims of lynch mobs but for black people as a whole: ‘This charge … is not merely against the individual culprit, as would be the case with an individual culprit of any other race, but it is in large measure a charge against the coloured race as such. It throws over every coloured man a mantle of odium.’ It underpinned the exclusion of blacks from politics and the right to vote, and the racial segregation of the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws then being enforced throughout the South. The fear of rape had become the ‘justification for Southern barbarism’. Douglass ended by quoting the former Senator, John T. Ingalls. There need be no ‘Negro problem’, he said. ‘Let the nation try justice, and the problem will be solved.’