III. MYTHS
There arise among groups of people various stories with little or no basis in fact, which, through repetition and unvaried association with the same persons or incidents, come to be regarded as true. These stories, when they persist through years and even through generations, are myths. They are usually the response to a prejudice or a desire.
In general they have some plausible and apparent justification. In turn they lend stability not only to the beliefs out of which they were born, but to themselves. Frequently they are the result of the assumption that because two things happen at the same time they are connected by the relationship of cause and effect. So long as these stories are uncorrected they hold and exercise a marked degree of control over personal conduct.
Myths are important in any consideration of the instruments of opinion-making. Fernand von Langenhove, a Belgian scientist associated with the Solvay Institute for Sociological Study at Brussels, has made probably the first researches in this field. He took as his material the reports spread in Germany by German soldiers concerning the Belgian priests. These myths, for the most part unfounded, began to spread and eventually were taken up by German authorities and given the stamp of official sanction. The reports were investigated and found to be false and libelous by German authorities themselves. The method by which these myths arose is thus described in his book The Growth of a Legend:
Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors began to circulate. They spread from place to place. They were reproduced by the press and they soon permeated the whole of Germany.... Public credulity accepted these stories. The highest powers in the state welcomed them without hesitation and indorsed them with their authority. Even the Emperor echoed them and, taking them for a text, advanced in the famous telegram of September 8, 1914, addressed to the President of the United States, the most terrible accusations against the Belgian people and clergy.
... It was the German army which, as we have seen, constituted the chief breeding ground for legendary stories. These were disseminated with great rapidity among the troops; the liaison officers, the dispatch riders, the food convoys, the victualling posts assured the diffusion of them....
Submitted to the test of the German military inquiry these stories are shown to be without foundation. Received from the front and narrated by a soldier who professes to have been an eye witness, they are nevertheless clothed in the public view with special authority. Welcomed without control by the press, the stories recounted in letters from the front appear, however, in the eyes of the readers of a paper clothed with a new authority—that which attaches to printed matter. They lose in the columns of a paper their individual and particular character.... The statements thus obtain a substance and an objectivity of which they would otherwise be devoid. Mixed with authentic news, they are accepted by the public without mistrust. Is not their appearance in the paper a guaranty of accuracy?...
All these pseudo-historical publications are, however, only one aspect of the abundant literary production of the Great War....
So one finds in this literature of the lower classes the principal legendary episodes of which we have studied the origin and followed the development; accommodated to a fiction, woven into a web of intrigue, they have undergone new transformations; they have lost every indication of their source; they are transposed in the new circumstances imagined for them; they have usually been dissociated from the circumstances which individualize them and fix their time and place.
The evolution of myths concerning Negroes shows a striking resemblance to these mentioned by von Langenhove. In this category would fall the myths concerning Negro mentality, or the closing of the frontal sutures at the age of fourteen; the "rape myth," or the belief that some character weakness and inordinate sexual virility in Negroes make them rapists by nature; and the "insurrection myth," or the recurrent assertion and belief that Negroes are plotting the downfall of the government. These are general in their acceptance. They illustrate the tendency of authors observed by Langenhove in his study "to incorporate new ideas with the complex old ones and show that they are not surprising and that all earlier facts tend to prove it." The efforts of some recent writers on the Negro question may be noted.
In 1895 R. M. Bache[95] made one of the first experimental studies of the relative mentality of the white, Negro, and Indian races. His study was based on only ten Negroes. He began with an assumption of the inferiority of Negroes and was satisfied that he had proved it. In his tests the whites were slowest in reacting to the visual, auditory, and electrical stimulation, the Indians were quickest, and the Negroes about midway between. He deduced from this that the whites were superior, the Indians next, and the Negroes the lowest of the group. The Negroes he explained were slower than the Indians because they were of mixed white and Negro blood and had inherited the effects of slavery, while the Indians' mode of life compelled them to rely upon quick movement. Therefore he said the Indian was of a higher race than the Negro. Dr. Vogt, a German anthropologist, is responsible for the statement: "On examining the brain of a Negro I find a remarkable resemblance between the ape and the Negro, especially with reference to the development of the temporal lobe." He made this deduction from the examination of the skull of one Hottentot Negro woman.
A. T. Smith made association and memory tests and concluded[96] that the Negro child was psychologically different from the white child in power of abstraction, judgment, and analysis. He took a single Negro boy as typical.
For the purpose of studying myths pertinent to this inquiry instances were taken from the testimony in race riots, both in East St. Louis and Chicago. The excerpts which follow illustrate the tendency of myths to create and give currency to rumors:
NEGROES SECRETING ARMS
I returned in about an hour and learned from Col. Tripp that it had been reported that Negroes were forming and had large quantities of arms and ammunition at a saloon on the northeasterly corner of Nineteenth and Market Avenue; at the time the small detachment of troops remaining at the City Hall was loaded into an auto truck and Col. Tripp, Lieut. Col. Clayton, Chief of Police Ransom Payne and myself, in my automobile proceeded to the saloon and pool-room located at the northeasterly corner of Nineteenth Street and Market Avenue, where it was reported there were large stores of ammunition and arms.
We accompanied Col. Tripp into the building and found perhaps fifteen or eighteen Negro men; Col. Tripp ordered them to surrender arms and there being no ready compliance with the order, he thereupon ordered them searched and found one man who had a number of loaded shot-gun shells. [Testimony by Thomas L. Fekete, Jr., city attorney of East St. Louis, at East St. Louis Inquiry into Conduct of Militia.]
NEGROES PLANNING ATTACK
Question: Now what happened Tuesday?
Answer: Well, Tuesday I spent most of my time in the City Hall except when we would be sent out on false alarms, calls from the different parts of the city. That was practically all of our work there then. There was no rioting on Tuesday, but they continued calling from different parts of the city that Negroes were forming and ready to attack, and we would send men, whenever they were available, out with squads, two squads of men to investigate, but invariably it was a false alarm. [Testimony by Major Wm. Klauser at East St. Louis Inquiry into Conduct of Militia.]
CONCEALING ARMS FOR INSURRECTION
We then searched the building, particularly the dwelling quarters above these rooms, for arms which it had been alleged Dr. L. N. Bundy had stored at this place. We found that Dr. Bundy had sent two cartons of his property to this place for safe-keeping and on opening the cartons, we discovered that they contained no firearms or ammunition, but contained automobile supplies and some stationery. [Testimony by Col. S. O. Tripp at East St. Louis Inquiry into Conduct of Militia.]
NEGROES ARMING AND PLANNING AN ATTACK
Then we commenced to get reports from different parts of the city that Negroes were arming, getting ready to attack. One of the persistent rumors was there were two hundred Negroes armed around Sixty and Bond streets some place there. That rumor was so persistent that Col. Tripp ordered me to take Company B down and investigate it and the police sent one policeman along to show us the way and show us the place where it was supposed to be. We got down there within probably three blocks of the place and the policeman told us we better not get too close without forming a line of skirmishers, which I did. I divided the company into two platoons. One platoon under the Company commander and the other under the first lieutenant, and we combed that district all through. The policeman deserted us as soon as we started out and we were all left alone. We combed all over for an hour or probably more.
Question: Who was the commander of Company B?
Answer: Captain Eaton. We did not find a single thing except two Negroes who just came out of a house. We searched them and they were armed and we arrested them. We brought these back with us when we came perhaps an hour or an hour and a half later.
Question: Is there anything else that night?
Answer: Yes, it was not very long until we got rumors that at about 27th and 28th and Tudor that the Negroes and whites were in a pitched battle. That is about two miles I think southeast, and they asked me to go out and look into the situation and take a squad of men with me ... we got to Eighteenth and Bond and we were perhaps a quarter of a mile ahead of the truck and we were fired upon. We stopped the car and Brown returned the fire. We could see smoke coming from a vacant lot and by that time the truck came up and we formed a line of skirmishers and went through and could not find a single thing.
The Chief of Police was advised, on rumor, that Negroes were forming in the Black Belt for the purpose of marching on the whites. In response to this rumor, the witness [Col. S. O. Tripp], the Acting Mayor [Fekete], and the military officials left for the seat of the purported mobilization of Negroes, but found that the report was untrue. The record shows that during this temporary departure of authorities, military and civil, acts of lawlessness were being exerted against Negroes in other sections of the city. [Testimony by Major Wm. Klauser at East St. Louis Inquiry into Conduct of Militia.]
ARMED AND MASSED ATTACKS BY NEGROES
... As we got to 27th and Tudor I found a first lieutenant of the Missouri National Guard there. I afterwards found out his name was Crawley. He had one soldier with him. He called him his orderly. I think his name was Murphy. There they were perhaps a dozen young men, about eighteen or twenty, armed with rifles and were lined up at 28th Street there under trees, that is behind trees, at least it looked that way in the night, and perhaps a half a block more north it looked to me two houses were burning; it was a big fire; they were burning, and they claimed that the Negroes had been firing at them and they were returning the fire, and I guess that is where the report came from. He advised me that it was a little dangerous work up there and that we had better form a few men, form a line of skirmishers, and I sent one bunch to the east side of the fire to see what we could find in there. So I did that. I gave Capt. Easterday a bunch of men, one detachment, and Lieut. Brown another, one on each side, and then Lieut. Crawley and one private went right through the center of it, right next to the place seemed deserted and we could not find anybody and we waited for the other detachments to come out and they did not find anything and I walked around, it seemed on the west side of the block, between 27th and 28th Streets, and I saw a couple of fellows sticking their heads up over the fence, the fence of an old two story brick building, and I hollered. I thought perhaps it was Lieut. Crawley and waited for him and we found a bunch of Negroes in there, perhaps twenty-five of them. Lieut. Crawley and myself lined them up and searched them and there was not a Negro who had any arms or ammunition, and we asked if there were any more in the house, and they said this private came in and already had three of us. So Lieut. Crawley said if I guard the ones outside he would go inside and run the rest out, so in the neighborhood of one hundred fifty or two hundred came out, men, women and children and we searched all of them but did not find anything on them. [Testimony by Thomas L. Fekete, city attorney at East St. Louis Inquiry into Conduct of Militia.]
1. THE RAPE MYTH
It is the common belief among whites that Negroes are rapists by nature. In this belief are involved the "fear obsession" of Negro men, held by many white women, fear of the "social equality" bugaboo, condonings of lynchings, and repressive social restriction as well as attempts at legislative restraints. The persistency of these assertions and this belief point to an interesting peculiarity of popular opinion.[97] There have been cases of rape involving Negroes, but they have contributed no such preponderance as would justify the wholesale charge against the Negro race. The tendency is to stress Negro sex offenses as though they alone constituted almost the whole of revolting crime. The usual proportion of white sex offenses is lost in the general statistics of crime. In the South, where it was first persistently asserted that Negro men have an abnormal tendency to sexual crimes, each crime, or attempted crime, and in many cases even suspected crime, of this sort has registered itself in a lynching.
In the twenty-year period between 1883 and 1903 there were lynched in the South 1,985 Negroes. Rape was assigned as the cause in 675 cases. In 1,310 cases other causes were given. James Welden Johnson, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has prepared figures on lynchings and sex offenses charged to Negroes which point out the misrepresentation in easy but persistent charges and the unquestioning acceptance of them by the public. He says:
Whenever the Negro protests against lynching, nearly all southern newspapers and a great many northern newspapers call upon him to deprecate the crime which leads to lynching. The authentic statistics on lynching prove the falsehood on which this propaganda is based. In the past thirty-five years fifty Negro women have been lynched. In the twelve-month period, August, 1918-August, 1919 [when the statement was prepared] five Negro women were lynched.
| Years | Lynchings | Number Charged with Rape |
|---|---|---|
| 1914-18[98] | 264 | 28 |
| 1883-1903 | 1,985 | 675 |
When the Congressional Committee on Immigration in 1911 made its study of crime in the United States, an investigation was made of 2,262 cases in the New York Court of General Sessions, and in that investigation it was found that the percentage for the crime of rape was lower for Negroes than for either the foreign-born whites or native whites.
| 1911 | Rape |
|---|---|
| Native-born whites | .8 per cent |
| Foreign-born whites | 1.8 per cent |
| Negroes | .5 per cent |
Contrast these records, bad as they may appear, with the records for New York County, which is only a part of New York City, and we find that in this one county in the single year of 1917, 230 persons were indicted for rape. Of this number, 37 were indicted for rape in the first degree.
| Place | Year | Crime | Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number indicted by Grand Jury, New York County | 1917 | Rape | 230 |
| Number of whites indicted by Grand Jury, New York County | 1917 | Rape in first degree | 37 |
| Number of Negroes indicted by Grand Jury, New York County | 1917 | Rape in first degree | 0 |
| Number of Negroes lynched in entire United States | {1914} {1918} | Charged with rape | 28 |
That is, in just a part of New York City the number of persons indicted for rape in the first degree was nine more than the total number of Negroes lynched on the charge of rape in the entire United States during the period 1914-1918. Among these thirty-seven persons indicted by the New York County Grand Jury, there was not a single Negro. The evidence required by the Grand Jury of New York County to indict a person charged with rape must be more conclusive than the evidence required by a mob to lynch a Negro accused of rape.
In Chicago the statistics of sex offenses tell a significant story. Chicago judges in the criminal courts were questioned by the Commission on their experience to test the foundation of this belief. Their replies were practically unanimous. Some of them are given:
Judge Pam: You talk about sex cases. Whether you call them rape cases or crimes against children, I have more serious rape cases against white than I have against colored people. The most serious case I had was about ten days ago, and I sentenced the man to life imprisonment. I never had such a case involving a Negro.
Commissioner: We read a great deal in the papers about rape in the South. How does the colored man stand on that matter in comparison to the white man?
Judge Thompson: Practically the same.
Commissioner: You spoke about crimes involving sex. What is your experience with regard to whether they are committed more often by colored persons than whites?
Judge Trude: I don't think in Chicago they are committed more by Negroes than whites.
Judge Thompson: In my work with the criminal court I was astounded at the large number of crimes involving the sexual abuse of children, but I remember no case in which a colored defendant was charged with that crime. Almost all other races were represented, but I don't remember one colored man charged with the abuse of a child.... I tried many of those cases, but never tried a colored man for that offense. I would say the majority of them were slavic or German; practically no Scandinavian.
Dr. Adler, State Criminologist: We had the same thing here in Chicago of a colored man sent to the penitentiary on a charge of attempted rape or something of that sort, where the identification was made by a child of six or eight years who picked him out in a crowd under suspicion. No such evidence ought to be accepted. We are perfectly sure, and everybody else agrees that such evidence is not sufficient to warrant the action.
2. THE SEX MYTH
East St. Louis riot.—The records of the Congressional Investigating Committee contain much evidence of the use of this myth in fomenting riots. Edward F. Mason, representing the interests of labor, gave a vivid account of the report that Negro men had committed vicious acts of assault against white girls in the East St. Louis streets. He stated further that 200 white women were among the 1,200 persons present at the meeting on the night of May 28, just prior to the riot, and that "we brought these girls along to see if we couldn't teach—we wanted to wake him [the mayor] up. He was in a trance. He couldn't see the thing like we did."
Alois Towers emphasized in his testimony the sentiment among the whites of East St. Louis just prior to the outbreak:
Mr. Chairman, yesterday I made the statement that the great influx of Negroes was responsible for the riot. I want to try and show some of the feelings that developed after this great influx of Negroes. It was a terrible feeling in the air. Everyone felt that something terrible was going to happen. On the street comers, wherever you went, you heard expressions against the Negro. You heard that the Negro was driving the white man out of the locality—by moving into the white neighborhood—that the whites were being forced out of their localities. Stories were afloat on the streets and on the street cars of the worst kind that would inflame the feelings. For instance, I heard one story so persistently that I commenced to think later on there might be some truth in it. First I thought it was just originated by some who might want to inflame the feelings of the people. I heard stories of this kind and I heard it no less than a dozen times on the streets of East St. Louis, that Negroes had made the boast that they were invited to East St. Louis; that great numbers of white people were taken away for war purposes; and that there would be lots of white women for the Negroes in East St. Louis.... The whole country became fearful. You could hear the same discussions away from East St. Louis. People were inflamed and their feelings were directed against big employers of East St. Louis, feeling that they were responsible for the great influx of Negroes.
Of actual assaults against white women there was found no evidence. Testimony by the mayor before the Military Committee investigating the conduct of soldiers adds substantiation to this fact:
Q.: Now did you hear of any other complaints of these colored men from any source as to their conduct and behavior when they first came here other than being imported here to work in large numbers?
A.: Yes sir.
Q.: What do you know about it?
A.: Some complaints that they were sticking up people, holding up people at night time, and various other police violations.
Q.: Now were these complaints verified by the records, or otherwise?
A.: I think they were, they were arrested and locked up, got trial and punishment, the usual procedure of the Police Department and Courts.
Q.: You keep in pretty close touch with these Police Court Proceedings?
A.: Yes sir.
Q.: So you would say that there were more colored people arrested and convicted for such offenses as you mentioned than there were four or two years ago?
A.: I have not made that comparison, but I would think so.
Q.: Any other offenses except larceny and robbery?
A.: No.
Q.: Any sex outrages?
A.: No.
Q.: No complaints or prosecutions that white women were outraged by colored men?
A.: No sir.
[Board of Inquiry, East St. Louis, Ill.]
Washington riot.—The Washington race riot was precipitated by reports of alleged attacks upon white women by Negroes. These reports were featured in the daily newspapers with large front-page headlines, and suggestions were made that probable lynchings would follow the capture of the Negroes. The series of reported assaults totaled seven. In each it was claimed that a Negro had assaulted a white woman. When the fury and excitement of the riot had subsided and the facts were sifted, it was found that of the seven assaults reported, four were assaults upon colored women. Three of the alleged criminals arrested and held for assault were white men, and at least two of the white men were prosecuted for assaults upon colored women. It further developed that three of the assaults were supposed to have been committed by a suspect who at the time of the riots was under arrest.
Waukegan riot.—A story with the implication that a sex issue was involved was the significant feature of the riot between marines from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, aided by citizens of Waukegan, and the Negro residents of Waukegan. It is entirely likely that the outburst was wholly precipitated by the entirely false report that "Mrs. Blazier, the wife of Lieutenant Blazier," was "attacked" by Negro boys.[100] Lieutenant Blazier, it developed, was unmarried and had no woman occupant in the car.
Chicago riot.—The most atrocious murder of the Chicago riot of 1919 was precipitated by a report involving an Italian girl. The story circulated that she had been killed by a Negro. Joseph Lovings, an innocent Negro, chanced into the neighborhood on a bicycle. He was set upon and murdered. The coroner found fourteen bullet wounds, many stab wounds, contusion of the head, and fractures of the skull bones and of the limbs. The report proved a myth, for no girl was killed by anyone during the riot. The Negro killed was innocent of any injury, and if a girl was injured it had not been learned by whom the injury was inflicted. There had been no previous rioting on the West Side, where the murder was committed, and no further clashes followed it. The usual report of the burning of the Negro which followed an assault was also circulated, and this was false and unfounded.
In the frenzy of the rioting in Chicago a report gained circulation that white women were being attacked by Negroes. Some reports picked up by newspapers asserted that women were being shot as the riot grew. The Chicago American during the riot pertinently made a plea for cool-headedness and intelligence in receiving reports. In an editorial it thus importuned the citizenry:
Don't circulate wild stories that tend to infuriate respectable citizens, both white and black. They are trying to suppress the hoodlums who have been responsible for all the rioting.
Don't believe every infuriating report you hear, and don't repeat them to others more credulous than yourself.
Depend on the American to tell you what happened just as accurately as careful, intelligent reporting will permit.
The most notable instance of inflammatory faking was observed in one newspaper (not the American) yesterday afternoon. It ran across its front page in big type the heading: "Women Shot as Riots Grow." It was based on an incoherent, unsubstantiated rumor which later investigation proved has no foundation.
The same information was received by the Evening American from the detective bureau, where the report was received. The American published a few lines announcing that the police had received such reports. Men were rushed out, but the report could not be verified, and this newspaper withdrew further publication of the unverified report.
At Chicago Heights a race riot was reported on August 7, 1920. It was said in the press that a Negro motor-cyclist had run down a Hungarian boy. The actual report circulated was that a Negro had struck an Italian girl. The latter report was not true; the first one, contrary to press reports, did not start a riot. In fact, there was no riot.
In the racial clash of September 20, 1920, the sex myth again arose.[101] Immediately after one of the Negroes had struck Barrett down, the trio ran. Few persons actually knew what had occurred. Excitement waxed high when the wild report flew about that a Negro had attacked a white woman. A mob of several thousand men, women, and children formed to storm the church in which they had sought refuge.
An investigator from the Commission, sent out immediately after the clash, picked up traces of this myth in the sentiments of white residents of the neighborhood.
There was a story which everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know concerning trouble on the street-car lines between Negroes and whites. A middle-aged Irish woman on Union Avenue, who had been with the crowd at the church, gave the following account of it: "Not long ago, a Negro knocked a white woman off the cars. It never appeared in the papers. I never go on the cars where they [Negroes] are. You couldn't get me to go on a State Street car line."
A barber at Forty-fifth Street and Emerald Avenue said:
There was some trouble the Saturday before Labor Day. A Negro gave the conductor a dollar bill, and the conductor said he hadn't change and told him to get off the car. As he was getting off, he knocked against a white woman, and seven men in an automobile who were right behind the car saw him and chased him. They brought him up to the alley right across the street, beat him up, and cut up his head something awful.