Harrop: Believing all women has led to evil before
By Froma Harrop / syndicated columnist
The hashtag #BelieveWomen stemmed from an era when women claiming to have been sexually assaulted were broadly dismissed. That is, if you ignore the history of white women falsely accusing black men of rape. Those women were largely believed and the accused often summarily tortured and hanged by the neck from a tree.
Ida Wells, an African American journalist, exposed the racial terrorism in her 1892 book “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” She just received a Pulitzer Prize 89 years after her death.
Between 1881 and 1968, 3,446 black men were killed by lynching, a number drawn from the Tuskegee Institute archives. Almost a quarter of lynching victims had been accused of sexual assault, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
A scholar, Wells didn’t ignore the reality that some rapes happened. She held, rather, that many such charges followed the discovery of consensual relationships between black men and white women; of which there were many.
Regarded as a vessel of Victorian purity, a white woman’s word was rarely doubted. That made legal proceedings unnecessary in the minds of the racist mob.
-more-
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/harrop-believing-all-women-has-led-to-evil-before/
= new reply since forum marked as read
