10 Things You May Not Have Known About Sexual Violence Committed Against Black People During The Jim Crow Era…
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[This is an important article not just because it speaks on the sexual violence but because it speaks to the sheer TERROR that freed BLACK people had to endured in early 20th Century America.
One of the most IMPORTANT and often forgotten points about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement is that it stopped this sheer TERROR that BLACK people were faced with daily…
Today’s young people have read King and Malcolm, understand the fight for integration and idolize Rosa Parks (who was also one of the first staunch advocates for rape victims) – BUT, they do not understand the DAILY Fear(s) and sheer TERROR Black people lived in and endured at the hands of the WHITE people/the Klu Klux Klan in the early 20th Century. The absolute sheer TERROR faced daily – even sleeping in one’s bed at night a BLACK person was not safe as the Klan could break in pull a BLACK man, woman or child out and beat, torture or rape/sexually assault them. There was no legal recourse for a BLACK person from these terrorizing brutal attacks.
The media and school His-story books have You believing it was only about “civil/equal rights” and IGNORE the real issue of the sheer TERROR (and Fear of being attacked/beat/lynched/raped/etc.) African Americans faced daily. MLKing and the Civil Rights Movement put an end to this reign of TERROR in America – “We shall overcome…” was about this TERROR. YOU should understand and be aware of this bit of American history…
James Baldwin said it best about America – American history is longer, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it…
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We all know WHY – but, isn’t it interesting that the Klu Klux Klan (which is still very active today – with mayors, governors, judges, administrators, public officials, your co-worker, neighbor, etc.as members) has NEVER been classified as a “TERRORIST” organization???
1. Trying to Reinstate White Male Dominance - Much as slave owners and their minions used sexual violence and coercion in displaying and exercising mastery over their human chattel, Klansmen systematically molested and violated their victims in an attempt to reinstate white male dominance in its antebellum form…
2. Sexualized Whippings - The sexualized nature of many Klan whippings can be read most clearly by looking at the location of punishment on the body and the manner in which these chastisements were administered…
3. Seeking the Humiliation of Victims - …the nightriders pulled a pregnant woman from her bed and demanded that she dance while her husband helplessly looked on. When victims danced, feigned sex acts or went through the motions of flagellation, they were performing their own subjugation. In doing so, they were being used to fulfill both the specular and the sexual needs of Klansmen seeking to revive the privileges of white masculinity over the bodies of their former slaves…
4. Seeking the Humiliation of Black Fathers - …a young Black man who was whipped by the Klan, then forced to go through the form of sexual intercourse with one of the girls in the house, all while the Klansmen continued to whip him — and all in the presence of the girl’s father…
5. A Black Man Describes Sexual Indignities - …Not only did Klansmen sometimes sadistically mark the sexual parts of Black men and women, male and female victims were often placed in sexually evocative positions by their attackers…
6. Naked in the Road - “…They had us all stripped there [in the middle of the road], and laughed and made great sport. Some of them squealed the same as if they were stable horses just brought out…”
7. KKK Borrows Bucking From Slavery - …Bucking was when a victim, often wholly or partially naked, was forced to lay bound across a log upon which a vigorous whipping would be staged…
8. Greater Threat for Black Women During Jim Crow - …the threat of sexual abuse was even greater for Black women in the postwar era than it had been when they were enslaved. The Klan’s propensity for employing rape as an instrument of terror has long been a matter of public record, such as with the testimony given at a number of Reconstruction-era tribunals…
9. False Charges of Raping White Women - …Freedmen were also unusually vulnerable to false charges of rape…
10. Brutal Gang Rapes of Black Women - Rhoda Ann Childs, a freedwoman married to a former Union soldier, provided an unusually detailed account of her violation by a gang of Georgia Klansmen in 1866…see horriffic story HERE
Photo references:
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- photo #2 -
- photo #3
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via AtlantaBlackStar
