By Marwa Barakat, Sasha Allen, Apurva Mahajan and Hannah Marszalek
Over the course of a century, hundreds of newspaper articles about lynchings accused Black men of assaulting white women, offering a justification for brutal racial violence. Despite these media portrayals, scholars said the image of the Black rapist is overblown.
Monroe Work, the pathbreaking scholar at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, observed that from 1885 to 1924, four-fifths of lynchings were for alleged crimes other than rape. Yet a Howard Center for Investigative Journalism review of lynching news coverage shows the female victim narrative emerged as a prominent theme starting in the 1880s and continuing for four decades.
In the 1880s, phrases describing female victims were the second most common occurrence in a sample of national news coverage. For the following four decades, female victims were featured in the top 10 most common two-word phrases.
For example, The Portland Daily Press in Portland, Maine on June 16, 1883, reported details of a lynching in Detroit, Michigan, of a man identified only as Warner, who was believed to have “outraged little Nettie Lyons.” Warner continuously defended his innocence even as a mob dragged him out of jail and hanged him.
“The girl identified him as (the) assailant, but he maintained his innocence even after being once let down to see if a confession could be extorted from him,” the article read. Often newspapers outside of the South would publish lynching news based on wire service reports or other content sharing agreements.
The investigation reinforced earlier studies of sexism in U.S. news coverage. The vulnerable woman stereotype enabled the press to frame Black men as dangerous, which perpetuated their disenfranchisement as fringe members of society, according to historian Estelle Freedman.
“By the end of the nineteenth century, the press had popularized not only the archetype of the violent black male rapist but also that of the innocent child victim,” according to Freedman, who studied the portrayal of sexual violence in white newspapers during the late 1800s.
This work is a collaboration of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and Capital News Service at the University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Morgan State University, Hampton University, Howard University, Morehouse College, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University and the University of Arkansas.
The Howard Center review builds on this scholarship by conducting a broad examination of newspapers across regions and time. The Howard Center examined the sexual assault narrative from a sample of 7,162 articles in the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper database, including 1,045 articles from African-American newspapers. This analysis is part of a broader review of 60,000 pages of lynching news coverage from 1789 to 1963 in the Library of Congress.
The Howard Center trained a computer to extract from a sample of articles the top two-word phrases per decade and rank phrases by number of occurrences. In the 1880s, “white girl” was the 11th most common two-word term out of 11,776 unique two-word phrases, and “white woman” was the 14th most common phrase. For the following four decades, language describing white female victims of sexual violence was in the top 10 most common two-word phrases.
One example: The Alaska Citizen in Fairbanks, Alaska, reported on the lynching of a Black man named Mose Gunn, who was accused of raping a 15-year-old white girl named Madge Gilmer in Nashville, Tennessee. Madge was found nearly unconscious in a box car but was revived to “disclose the identity of the man who had outraged her.”
“When found, the colored man denied all knowledge of the crime. His captors, however, took him to the home of the girl and she positively identified him,” the article said.
Gunn was deprived of any trial and a mob lynched him in broad daylight in a railroad yard on the outskirts of Nashville, the article reported. According to the article, the county’s sheriff was not notified of the lynching until it had already been completed.
These phrases about females in lynching stories typically implied a rape narrative, where white women and girls accused Black men of rape or sexual assault. The “girl” narrative is notable since Freedman noted a decrease in the ages of female victims of sexual crimes being reported.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sensational news coverage known as yellow journalism was also on the rise, where newspapers exploited issues such as sex, crime and graphic content in both their stories and illustrations.
Some newspapers engaged in “impostures and frauds of various kinds, such as ‘faked interviews’ and stories, misleading heads, pseudo-science, and parade of false learning,” according to historian Frank Luther Mott. News wire services further spread these sensationalized narratives across the country that portrayed Black men as villains.
Journalist Ida B. Wells wrote about these inflated accusations of sexual assault and rape against lynching victims in her 1892 investigation, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” In one case, Wells found that a white woman, Mrs. J.S. Underwood, accused William Offett, a Black man, of rape. Underwood said he broke into her home, chloroformed her and raped her.
Offett was granted a trial, found guilty and spent 15 years in prison. After Offett had been in prison for four years of his sentence, Underwood changed her story. In reality, Underwood and Offett met at the post office and he helped her carry packages home. Later, he returned with gifts and then engaged in consensual sex.
Underwood’s retraction of her accusation was published in The Cleveland Gazette on January 16, 1892. According to Wells, there were “thousands” of similar accusations of rape and sexual assault publicized throughout the South.
