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3. Black Victims and Postwar Trial Strategies In February 1959, Bernice Briggs appeared in court to testify against rape defendant Lawrence White, whom she accused of sexually attacking her the previous year. When she began recounting the circumstances that led up to the assault, Briggs quickly identified the defendant as the man who grabbed her while she was waiting for a taxi early one morning. He hit her head with an empty bottle, and, she testified, forced her to perform oral sex on him despite her pleas that she did not “know nothing about that kind of monkey business like that.”1 According to Briggs, her assailant pushed her down, hit her a few more times, and then began to rape her. She also testified that she was able to reach a switchblade she kept in her pocket, which she used to stab her attacker in the head, giving herself the chance to get away. When she reported the attack, the police called local hospitals to see if a man who fit the general description Briggs provided, and who might have been treated for a head injury, was at any of them. The Cook County Hospital staff indicated that they were caring for such a patient and promised to keep him there until the police arrived. Briggs went along, where she identified Lawrence White as the man who had attacked her that morning.2 When the prosecutor asked her if she received any treatment for her own injuries at the time, she told him not just then but that she did “receive my treatment fourteen hours after that at the Provident and they didn’t treat me good at that time.”3 The prosecutor dropped that line of questioning, and when White’s attorney cross-examined her, Briggs’s testimony never returned to the poor medical treatment she mentioned earlier during the trial. Lawrence White told the court a very different story. He claimed that he was mugged and stabbed, which is why he was at the hospital when the police arrested him.4 Black Victims and Postwar Trial Strategies 75 Briggs and White were both African Americans living in Chicago when violent circumstances brought them to the attention of the criminal justice system. The rape trial of Lawrence White clarifies some important shifts that had begun in Chicago, and within the justice system, during the 1950s: shifts that would ultimately come to affect the structure of the contemporary rape trial. According to his attorney, White was identified under questionable circumstances and furthermore was identified by a woman who had been “on some kind of relief . . . her word is good for nothing.”5 Although White’s attorney questioned the actions of the Chicago police, which he claimed were blatantly prejudicial, he reserved his harshest scrutiny for the alleged victim. He used stereotypes of black women as sexually promiscuous, and of black single mothers and welfare recipients as dishonest, in an attempt to acquit his client. Because both the alleged victim and perpetrator were African American, the arguments that emerged during this trial abandoned strategies that revolved around racial discrimination exclusively but instead reinforced gender privilege in the courtroom. Even as the system was beginning to open up for defendants, who benefited from stricter rules of evidence that protected the rights of the accused, rape victims suffered more pointed character attacks during trials even after their bodies may have recovered from physical assaults. Briggs turned to the police after she was sexually attacked and cooperated with their investigation, despite her misgivings about a system that mistreated her. As a sixteen-year veteran of domestic service and a welfare recipient, Briggs was certainly familiar with racial discrimination in a white-privileged society.6 She received Aid for Dependent Children (ADC) for children who lived with her mother, so she also suffered the stigma of being an incompetent parent, suspect in her claims of State protection.7 Briggs nonetheless trusted the justice system to do something about the violent attack she suffered. And the State responded, in spite of any reservations white society held about the status of African American women, whom many believed to be sexually promiscuous and thus unlikely rape victims. That African American women successfully testified in intraracial rape cases challenges historical beliefs that their unchaste sexual nature made them undeserving of State protection or legal recourse following sexual attacks.8 When they came forward to report rapes, black women encountered continuing silence from the activist minority community over their...

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