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ERIC W. RISE, THE MARTINSVILLE SEVEN, RACE, RAPE, AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. (University Press of Virginia, 1995) 216 pp.
The execution of black men for allegedly raping white women is a defining characteristic of the history of race relations in the South. In the years between the Civil War and the early 1930s, these executions often took the form of extra-legal lynchings in which black men were burned, shot, or hung by mobs of whites.(1) Lynching served primarily as a means to control black people in a white supremacist culture. However, Southern apologists for lynching argued that the mob acted in order to protect the virtue of white Southern womanhood from black men who were incapable of controlling their desire for white women.(2) Thus, beyond functioning as a justification for Lynching, the mythical black rapist also served to create an atmosphere of danger and menace in which the white Southern woman was kept in
role of vulnerability and weakness in the patriarchal South.(3) Lynching, though, began to die out as a primary means of social control around 1930.(4)
But the demise of lynching did not end the Southern practice of executing blacks accused of raping white women. The electric chair and the gas chamber of the criminal justice system replaced the rope and faggot of the mob. Yet death at the hands of the state proved no more just than had death by the lynch mob. The trials of black men accused of raping white women were all too often mere "legal lynchings"--resulting sometimes from false charges and conducted in a manner that merely gave a passing nod to the procedural incidents of due process.(5) And the number of legal executions rivaled the number of lynchings. Between 1930 and the early 1970s, the Southern states executed 405 black men convicted of rape.(6) In the wake of the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, striking down all then-prevailing death penalty laws, most of the states that had previously punished rape as a capital offense declined to include rape among the offenses eligible for the death penalty under laws designed to meet Furman's requirements.(7) The last hold-out was Georgia, whose statute making rape a capital offense was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1977 in...