Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts

2. The Power of Racial Rape Myths after World War II

2. The Power of Racial Rape Myths after World War II Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, And the sudden smell of burning flesh! Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.1 In 1939, jazz singer Billie Holiday first performed Strange Fruit, an emotionally intense song about African Americans lynched in the South. Holiday released the song that year on an independent label because her regular one, Columbia, was not interested in it. By the end of World War II, the recording had sold over fifty thousand copies and was well publicized in the left-wing press. Holiday’s numerous performances across the country made it a sensation , and it became her signature song.2 Passersby on Forty-Seventh Street, in the heart of what was known as the “Harlem of Chicago,” often heard it as music drifted out of the jazz clubs and entertainment spots that featured stars such as Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughn, and Holiday herself, who often performed on Chicago’s south side.3 Jazz artists recognized the song as “the first unmuted cry against racism” in America.4 Although lynching had been Racial Rape Myths after World War II 49 a theme in black fiction, theater, and art, it had not figured prominently in music prior to Holiday’s recording. Certainly, such overt lyrics had never before been directed at white audiences. White Americans who enjoyed Holiday’s performances of Strange Fruit generally resisted the song’s message about discrimination and racial violence. Others missed it entirely, as was evident in a famous recollection of one request, made to Holiday in a Los Angeles nightclub in 1950, to “sing that sexy song . . . the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees.”5 She refused. While no black men were formally lynched in Chicago in the twentieth century, the lyrics in Strange Fruit evoked the kind of discriminatory treatment that African Americans throughout the nation recognized. Although black male sexuality had been condemned as savage and potentially dangerous throughout American history, it was after Emancipation that African American men were represented as a particular threat to the social order, especially in Southern states. In the late nineteenth century, white Southerners regularly discriminated against and attempted to control a newly free black population. Of special concern was the threat of racial miscegenation: the fear that African American men, free to pursue economic and social equality no matter how thwarted their attempts may have been, would also want sexual access to white women.6 A related belief was that no white woman, no matter how lowly or depraved, would ever willingly consent to interracial relations, in spite of significant evidence to the contrary.7 White Southerners used these fears to rationalize extreme violence against African American men and used the excuse of rape to justify the lynchings and vigilantism that supported the racial status quo. By World War II, instances of lynch mob violence had decreased significantly, but the specter of interracial sexual violence continued to govern trial proceedings, even outside the Jim Crow South.8 Many Americans continued to believe that black men were sexual predators and likely perpetrators of rape if accused, especially but not exclusively , by white women. Among the many injustices African Americans suffered throughout the twentieth century was a systematically racist criminal justice system. An almost entirely white police force often arrested the first dubious looking black suspect found near the scenes of reported crimes.9 In postwar rape trials, black men in Chicago tried explicitly to defend themselves against the system’s racism. In the cases analyzed here, they were unsuccessful and convicted. White judges and juries who heard allegations against African American rape defendants did so with full knowledge of historical rape myths that constructed black men as sexual predators. Consequently, they handed down swift and severe punishments against African American men so ac- 50 chapter 2 cused. Black Chicagoans related to Holiday’s song on a different level than whites because they understood that the system...