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.