Abstract
To lynch, regardless of the techniques employed, is to use terror or the threat of torture as a control mechanism. To question this practice of unmitigated denial of due process can be construed as a willingness to die for what one believes. It is quite possible that Ida B. Wells expected to encounter opposition when she questioned the veracity that “Southern apologists justify their savagery on the ground that Negroes are lynched only because of their crimes against women.”1 Her assessment about lynchings ascribed to black men’s interactions with white women antagonized Memphis’s leading white citizens.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See, e.g., Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999)
Angela Y Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 177.
Copyright information
© 2010 Angela D. Sims
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sims, A.D. (2010). The Social Construction of Gender and Lynching. In: Ethical Complications of Lynching. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106208_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106208_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38411-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10620-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)