"They didn't treat me good": African American rape victims and Chicago courtroom strategies during the 1950s

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Flood, Dawn Rae ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40749112947     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2005.0006     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Transcript of the motions hearing for Lawrence White, 5 May 1959, case #58-1977, IL v. Lawrence White (1958), 33, CCA.
2. See Linda Gordon, "Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century," in U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 81-82.
3. On black women's resistance to sexual stereotypes and the justice system's denial of their sexual victimization, see E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001 ), esp. 33-37;
4. and Maria Bevacqua, Rape on Use Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 11, 21-26.
5. On rape as a justification for lynching, see Patricia A. Schechter, "Unsettled Business: Ida B. Wells against Lynching, or, How Antilynching Got Its Gender," in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the New South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 292-317;
6. On black women's activism against racial and sexual violence, see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999);
7. Angela Y. Davis, Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1985);
8. and Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc., 1984).
9. On the civil rights movement in the South, see Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
10. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984);
11. and Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
12. On postwar civil rights activism in Chicago, see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
13. Christopher Robert Reed, The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910-1966 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), esp. 172-90;
14. and Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).
15. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Census, "Population Statistics: Race and Ethnic Origins," http://fisher.lib. virginia.edu/census, accessed on 22 July 2002.
16. The professionalization of the justice system meant that, in general, fewer cases over time ever made it to trial. See Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), esp. 386 and 404.
17. On the growth and decline of black support for Daley, see William Roger Biles, Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race and the Governing of Chicago (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995);
18. and William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931-1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 91-140.
19. Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 163.
20. White, Too Heavy a Load, 22-23.
21. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 63-64.
22. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 25 White, Too Heavy a Load, 127-28.
23. See William Marvin Dulaney, "Black Shields: A Historical and Comparative Survey of Blacks in American Police Forces" (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1984), esp. 16-19 and 40-41.
24. See also Chicago Police Department, "Statistics," in Annual Report, 1945.
25. Andrew E. Taslitz, Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 105-109, and 113-15.
26. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 10-12.
27. On resistance to racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, see Reed, The Chicago NAACP, 4.
28. Hirch, Making the Second Ghetto, 12-16, 35,186, and 196.
29. See also St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1945), esp. 182-90.
30. On districts recording the highest number of rape complaints, see Virgil W. Peterson, compl., A Report on Chicago Crime (Chicago: Chicago Crime Commission Reports, 1954-1968).
31. On legal bias against the poor, see Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 377-79;
32. and Coramae Richey Mann, Unequal Justice: A Question of Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 166-219.
33. See Sonya Michel, Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 170-71;
34. and Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994), esp. 111-44.
35. On witness preparation in rape trials, see Flood, "Proving Rape," 52-54.