White Women and the Lynching Myth

Media Clip (News Anchor): We're going to turn now to that confrontation that was caught on camera, sparking outrage overnight. A white woman calling the police after a Black man says he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. T.J. Holmes joins us with what they're both saying this morning. Good morning, T.J.

Media Clip (T.J. Holmes- Reporter): 'There's an African American man threatening my life.' Robin, those are the exact words this woman used in a frantic manner on 911. And so much of the outrage you mentioned, Robin, that is there this morning has to do with what many people perceive as her attempt to threaten and weaponize the police against a Black man.

Media Clip Intro: ...country, very courageous young people who say, 'I'm willing to stick to my claim, make a pledge, and I will abstain until I'm married.' I'm not married yet. I made a claim a long time ago, but I want to recommit myself to say that I will wait until I'm married. So I'm going to do it with them. I'm very proud of y'all. They're so awesome in number, I'm looking at an ocean of young people. And not only do they represent themselves, but each teenager out here, each young person, represents pundits back home that couldn't make it. As they stake their individual claims, their individual commitment cards and drive them to the ground here in the National Mall.

Sara Moslener: Welcome back to Pure White. A podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. A co-production of Axis Mundi Media and the After Purity Project. I'm your host Sara Moslener. Welcome to episode four: White Women and the Lynching Myth. Last episode, we looked at the concept of true womanhood. As an ideal, it never reflected women's actual experiences, and created a set of goals that most women could only aspire to. In 1830 a new media technology emerged: the women's magazine. The images and narratives women could now access gave them aspirations for social status. They also reinforced beliefs in who could be considered a true woman. Long before Mommy Blogs and 'Mom-fluencers,' true womanhood ideology circulated as a religious and racial ideal that offered middle-class, white women an elevated social and political status...if they were willing to accept those ideals as personal virtues. Today we're going to look at how white women's investment in their own innocence became a strategy of racial power. This racial power has become an instinct for white women; women like Amy Cooper, who called the police and claimed an African American man was threatening her. Her behavior reminded many in the public of the lynching myth-- a false-flag narrative about Black men's sexual aggression and white women's sexual innocence and physical vulnerability. A century ago, white women invested in the virtues of true womanhood could not reckon with the violence of lynching. Their investment in whiteness made them unable to see the truth of the racial violence around them. As president of one of the most influential women's organizations, The Women's Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard was deeply invested in the moral authority that true woman ideology granted to white women. The WCTU was primarily dedicated to the cause of temperance. Their reform work addressed social problems such as alcohol abuse, prostitution and domestic violence. As defenders of the home, 'White Ribbon Women' as they were called, used the Victorian value of domesticity to expand their moral authority beyond the home. But more importantly, the virtue of sexual purity, they believed, gave them an entitlement to expand their political influence. The organizing genius of The WCTU was to use popular understandings of gender to claim that white women who lacked political standing had a level of moral authority that outmatched men. The WCTU adopted an initiative that had begun in the Church of England by philanthropist Ellice Hopkins, called the White Cross Army. Purity, for Hopkins, was about educating men toward a more noble kind of masculinity that would, in turn, protect more vulnerable women. In the US the WCTU and the YMCA adopted the White Cross Movement, holding meetings and creating literature to promote social purity among young people. The White Cross chapters even developed their own purity pledge. Take a listen:

Media Clip (White Cross Purity Pledge): I promise, by the help of God, to uphold the law of purity as equally binding on men and women. To be modest in language, behavior and dress. To avoid all conversations, reading, art, amusements, which may put impure thoughts into my mind. To guard the purity of others, especially of my companions and friends. To strive after that special blessing promised to the pure in heart.

Sara: Interesting, huh? Purity pledges in the 19th century. So what was the context in which young people were being encouraged to take these pledges? Victorian Protestants were an optimistic lot. They saw the US as holding great promise as a quickly advancing civilization. And preserving the sexual purity of women and young people was a pre-existing condition of achieving that great promise.

Sara: White women's sexual purity was part of a collection of national myths used to maintain the boundaries between Black and white. Though slavery had ended, the widespread Christian teachings that justified the separation of the race and Black inferiority remained intact. The Era of Reconstruction offered Black men full political enfranchisement, and soon interracial political coalitions became a reality in the former Confederate South. In response to this new social arrangement, white Christians used racial terror-lynchings to reinstate the old racial order. This call for violence circulated as a rumor that a Black man had raped a white woman.

Vron Ware: Men were often lynched because it was said that they had assaulted white women. And actually, Frederick Douglass said, even he had thought this was what was going on. He had fallen for the idea that they were kind of getting punished by communities, by the mobs, because they were fond of assaulting white women. Research showed that actually, not only was this not the case, but often it was the white women who had initiated relationships.

Sara: Vron Ware is a British academic, journalist, and author of the book, 'Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History,' which details the history of US anti-lynching politics in England.

Vron: But actually there was a much more important political diagnosis of what was going on with lynching, which was actually about driving Black businesses to fail because they were competing with white owned businesses. And actually maintaining some kind of threat of terror, which kept people out of public office during the Reconstruction Period. So much more going on. So this was part of her much more sophisticated analysis. But the fact that she would say that white women actually sometimes initiate, and she'd spoken to them and their families, and she'd understood what was going on. That they had initiated relationships was anathema to a lot of white women, particularly those who were, again, in the temperance movement, or who were trying to to sort of perpetuate this idea that white women were kind of more moral, more responsible, and therefore should be involved in politics, which was the position of some leading feminists of the time.

Sara: In 1892, Ida B. Wells, then living in Memphis, Tennessee, began reporting on the widespread practice of lynching in her newspaper, The Free Speech. Now considered one of the boldest journalists and reformers in US history, in her own time, Wells faced significant opposition and threats to her work and her person because she challenged the sexual myths of lynching, especially with the ones that asserted white women had no interest in sex. She herself was threatened with lynching, her newspaper office was burned, and she had to flee Memphis for Chicago.

Sara: Frances Willard of the WCTU outrightly rejected Wells's claims about the lynching myth, and this initiated a years long debate between the two. Their debate is now the subject of an online exhibit at Frances Willard House, an archive and library of her work in Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Ella Wagner is a public historian who worked as the Digital Curator for the exhibit. Here she is explaining what was at stake in the debate.

Ella Wagner: So, for Wells, what's at stake is, you know, nothing less than really the whole like Black lives and livelihoods in the South and really throughout the country and the future of the nation. Whether it's going to become this permanently segregated place enforced by mob violence. Or whether Black people are going to be able to claim the, you know, the rights that they have that are enshrined in the Constitution, that are being ignored. And so for her, you know, that's the kind of guiding light that inspires everything that she's doing. And in this particular case, she knows that Willard is someone who is important, and who has a reputation as being this progressive person, and that, you know, whom people listen to. And who also has claimed this kind of particularly Christian moral authority to be working towards a better, and kinder, and more just society. And so she's very much like this kind of person should be speaking out against lynching, and instead, she's basically condoning it. You know, she's, she's using, she's repeating this racist rhetoric about Black men being rapists.

Sara: Because this debate offers us so much material for thinking about white racial identity. We decided not just to talk about it, but to let you listen to it for yourselves. Up next is a dramatization of the exchanges between Willard and Wells based on the documents that Dr. Wagner used for the online exhibit. We wanted you to hear, in their own words, what was at stake. More importantly, I want you, the listener, to be able to hear what the white imagination sounds like. Though we've taken some artistic liberties by crafting their public comments into a dialog, the exchange tells us a lot about the power of sexual purity and the violence that erupts when white women's sexual and racial innocence is called into question.

Dramatization - Willard: [With dramatic flourish] So that my heart is full of hope, and out of the long savagery and darkness and crime, I see humanity coming up into the brightness and beauty of a new civilization.

Dramatization - Wells: [Aside] She had been figuratively wined and dined by the best white people of the South. She had made an opening for, and received recognition of, her organization, such as had never occurred before. She was charmed by the culture and hospitality of those by whom she was entertained.

Dramatization - Willard: [Full of self-righteousness] I see the noblest men of the world's foremost race, the Anglo-Saxons, placing upon women's brow, above the wreath of Venus, the helmet of Minerva, and leading forward the fair divinities who preside over their homes to help them make a new and nobler government.

Dramatization - Wells: [Aside] When she went back North, there appeared an interview in the New York Voice, the organ of the Temperance forces, in which she practically condoned lynchings.

Sara: So, I hope you're noticing Willard's language here. It's laden with her characteristic Victorian flourish. She knew how to hold her own in rooms of power, and she knew how to get powerful men and women to support causes that advanced white women's social and political status. The WCTU was the largest and most powerful women's organization in the United States, if not the world, at this time. Willard rarely faced criticism, so when Ida B. Wells showed up with receipts that needed accounting for, Willard was taken aback. The tension between the two tells us so much about how prominent white women in the 19th century promoted their own racial dominance, and how the work and rhetoric of sexual purity was a very effective tool for helping them to do so. But as well as revealed, it also firmly established the racial habits of white womanhood writ large. Habits that demanded white women divorce themselves from their own sexual desires and from any awareness of the problematic nature of white racial dominance.

Dramatization - Willard: [Imperious] The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be dominated by the Negro, so long as his aptitude reaches no higher than the personal liberty of the saloon and the power of appreciating the amount of liquor that $1 will buy. Better whiskey and more of it has been the rallying cry of great dark-faced mobs in the Southern localities. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog shop is its center of power. 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 site of their own roof tree.

Dramatization - Wells: [Aside] So far as anyone knew, Miss Willard had never retracted or explained this interview.

Sara: As Wells knew Willard was promoting a false narrative that Wells would come to call The Lynching Myth-- the belief that free Black men are a sexual threat to white women, their current and future children, and the sanctity of the home. After emancipation, the increased political and social power of freed Black men threatened the white, southern social order. The stereotype of Black hyper masculinity that became an increasingly common stereotype after emancipation allowed white people to justify heinous acts of racial violence for decades in an effort to restore the white supremacist social order of slavery. But it was also a powerful myth in the North, and Willard's need to expand The WCTU into the South required her to embrace it as a true narrative. Though, as Wells points out, it wasn't just a strategy, but a strongly held belief that Willard had no interest in questioning.

Dramatization - Wells: [Taking center stage] Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreached themselves, and public sentiment will have a reaction. A conclusion will then be reached that will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

Sara: Willard was outraged at Wells' remarks, viewing them as an attack on white women's virtue. This provoked her into dismissing all the evidence that Wells had gathered and to disparage her in public.

Dramatization - Willard: [Aside] Ida B. Wells, a young colored woman who has been speaking in England recently on behalf of her race, and particularly against lynching in the South, has greatly injured her cause by impulsive and untrue statements.

Dramatization - Wells: The Southern white man says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force.

Dramatization - Willard: [Aside] If Miss Wells is not careful, she will kill her cause by imprudent speeches. It is simply absurd to suppose that the Christians of America are indifferent to the reign of lynch law. But there are considerations in connection with this whole matter which are studiously suppressed in some of the statements we have seen. At any rate, the churches must not be regarded as approving lynch law simply because they do not believe in Miss Wells methods of getting rid of it. [Taking center stage] My family, for generations back, were all abolitionists. My parents, educated at the famous abolitionist College in Oberlin. I, myself, learned to read out of a little book entitled: 'The Slave's Friend.' And now I am a prime cause of the terrible lynchings and burnings of the colored people of the South? (laughter)

Sara: Okay, I need to stop here a moment and just to acknowledge this, as I've heard many esteemed Black commentators call it, the 'caucacity.' The audacity of white people. It's really amazing to me, in this era of talking about white privilege, etc, etc, that people think it's something new. Willard's comments are textbook denialism, and defensiveness, and self-exoneration that characterize the racial habits of whiteness; the caucacity. That is the way white people, that we, are socialized to view ourselves as innocent of wrongdoing, and Ida B. Wells was having none of it.

Dramatization - Wells: [Taking center stage] In numerous instances where colored men have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of the lynching, and indisputably proven after the victim's death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine. And that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained.

Dramatization - Willard: It is my firm belief--

Dramatization - Wells: The world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of Civil War...

Dramatization - Willard: It is my firm belief that in this statement--

Dramatization - Wells: ...when white women of the South were at the mercy of the race, which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.

Dramatization - Willard: ...that in the statements made by Miss Wells concerning white women--

Dramatization - Wells: The race and the public generally, should have statements of the facts as they exist.

Dramatization - Willard: [trying, desperately, to get a word in edgewise]...white women, having taken the initiative in nameless acts between the races, she has put an imputation upon half the white race.

Dramatization - Wells: Why is it that white women attract Negro men now more than in former days? There was a time when such a thing was unheard of. There is a secret to this thing, and we greatly suspect it is the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos. The truth remains that Afro-American men do not often ravage white women without their consent.

Sara: Ida B. Wells called out white women who stood by while their lovers were brutalized by white mobs. In one case, a woman was coerced by her family to make charges against her lover, and even lit the fire that would burn him to death. As she did so he declared, 'Why are you doing this when we've been sweethearting for so long?' 

The weight of a white woman's reputation lay heavily on her community. It functioned as the boundary marker between both white and Black and between purity and impurity. When that boundary was threatened, reaction was fierce and violent, even convincing a once amorous partner to turn on her beloved

Public debate between Wells and Willard holds significance for understanding the racial power assigned to white womanhood through the virtue of sexual purity. What for Willard was an opportunity to expand white women's rights was to Wells a way to enforce white racial power. Her investigations into racial terror-lynchings of hundreds of Black men demonstrated how white women's sexual purity held significant representational power to maintain racial segregation and white racial dominance. Simply put: sexual purity was about preserving racial purity as fears of race mixing made white women into a symbol of national strength and civilizational advancement-- one that had to be protected at all costs.

Within the white imagination, white women are innocent and therefore vulnerable. This continues to be a racist tactic used to justify anti-Black violence, one that has stood the test of time. As we heard at the top of this episode, white women do weaponize their vulnerability. This is why Amy Cooper's behavior sparked outrage, because the public recognized her use of the lynching myth to weaponize her vulnerability and accuse an African American man of threatening to assault her. An African American man who was spending his day in Central Park bird-watching.

This has been Pure White a podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. Made possible by generous grants from the Louisville Institute and the Luce Foundation Project on Religion and Sexual Abuse. This week's episode featured Anna Nugent and Yasmeen Duncan in the roles of Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells. Thank you to Vron Ware and Dr. Ella Wagner for sharing their expertise so generously. Be sure to check out the online exhibit, 'To Tell the Truth' about the Wells/Willard debate. Link to the exhibit is in the show notes. Next week, we examine the legacy of the lynching myth and how sexual fear circulates through stereotypes, urban legends, and Christian purity teachings. Please join us. 

Pure White is a co-production of Axis Mundi Media and the After Purity Project. Created by me, Sara Moslener. Executive Produced by Bradley Onishi. Editing, audio, and music by Scott Okamoto. With Production Assistance from Kari Onishi. See you next time.