I most certainly did not write that raping a white woman is a political, insurrectionary act. I wrote that reserving the death penalty for that crime exclusively for Blacks during the 300-year history of Virginia was a politically repressive act, as every African-American knew. Moreover, in light of the high religiosity of the Black population, the fact that the bodies of rapists were given to medical schools for dissection in Virginia while those of persons executed for any other crime were given to their families for burial was another form of discriminatory repression. I am not aware that other former slave states differed from these practices. William Mandel
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