On Michael Wright's closing point regarding the relative policies of
other former slave states regarding discriminatory executions of
Blacks and discriminatory disposition of bodies for dissection or the
families, my caveat was solely for the sake of careful scholarship. I
have no reason whatever to believe that the other states were better
than Virginia.
I have to say that Wright's position represents a particularly
short-sighted and old-fashioned form of white chauvinism. Post-slavery
law in the South, particularly after the defeat of Reconstruction and
the violent suppression of alliances between Blacks and poor whites in
end-of-19th-century populism (the Wilmington Massacre, for example),
was specifically crafted and even more specifically enforced as a
means of political terrorism against African-Americans. The Scottsboro
Case is a particularly well-known instance of absolutely false
accusation of rape, subsequently renounced in court by one of the
alleged victims, used fundamentally to keep Blacks "in their place."
An endless number of lynchings occurred over false rape charges made
for a variety of reasons from wanting a Black neighbor's property to
trying to cover an under-age white female's pregnancy.
When I was in Richmond in 1951 in the unsuccessful attempt to save
the Martinsville Seven from execution, I took very detailed
biographical information on why people had come there for that
purpose. One was from a white woman from Oklahoma, who, when in high
school, had seen a rape cry raised against a Black kid, who was not
subjected either to lynching or trial because the fact of the liaison
of the white girl involved with a white boy was too widely known among
the white students. I quote that story in detail in my Saying No To
Power.
William Mandel
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