Blog Entry One

    After reading Crystal Feimster’s book Southern Horrors, what still sticks out to me the most are the included quotes from Rebecca Felton concerning white men’s lawlessness as a reason for the rapes committed by black men on white women. On multiple occasions she states that white men and their corrupt practices are what have made black men the deviants they were seen to be, as their anger stemmed from their inability to rise up in social, economic and political arenas past a certain point.

In the south, after the end of the Civil War and the implement of Radical Reconstruction there was an upsurgance of the lynching of black men, women, and even poorer whites that associated with them. The rape and murder of white women, or the threat of such, was the given validation behind many of the lynching, which took place. I feel fairly certain that while it is not impossible for a white woman to have been threatened thus, it is also equally likely, if not more so, that the idea and threat of lynching were used to gain back some of the political, economic, and social power that white men had lost to black men after the universal freedom from slavery that occurred in the United States.

Why would Felton, a woman who historically had never strayed from the path of the defense of southern men and women suddenly blame “one of her own” for the folly of black men? “White men’s lawlessness and corrupt practices in the form of election fraud and the manipulation and subjugation of black men fed black criminality, and thereby increased the sexual vulnerability of white women” (Feimster, 127) In this statement, Felton directly places the rape of white women by black men in the hands of the white politicians disenfranchisement of black men.

    This, more than any other statement, more than any depiction of violence, surprised me. Of course then I had to wonder at why it was so hard for me to grasp the concept that someone who was most likely a white supremacist would not solely blame the race, which was “committing” the crimes. Most of it has to do with our desire as people to label. “This woman is good, this woman is bad, this woman couldn’t possibly be southern and understanding of or sympathetic towards non-white peoples.” It is nearly impossible, from a modern perspective, to know every nuance of the culture that would lead a white woman to “betray her race.” What context made it ok for Felton to make these assertions with relatively little repercussions? Being white, moderately wealthy, and the wife of a politician couldn’t have hurt.

    Felton is trying to gain political power by speaking her mind and naming a problem to which there was presumably a solution. The topic, which she is speaking on, is political. It stems from her belief that poor southern women needed to be given economic opportunity and legal protection. Yet it is her protected, elevated position as a southern white woman that allows her to make these statements.

Furthermore, is Felton’s statement as meaningful to the perceived and accepted innocence (or more accurately the unavoidance of their guilty behavior) of the black community, specifically men, if the rights she is advocating for are actually those belonging to white women.

I would be lying if I said I was one hundred percent sure of where I stand on the issue. I want to believe that it is admirable for Felton to stand up for the powerlessness of black men. Yet, she didn’t want to give black men and women and more power. She simply wanted to protect southern white women. How do we evaluate the importance or lack thereof from a modern perspective?