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134 f o ur Black Beasts and the Historical Imaginations of Margaret Mitchell and AllenTate The psychology of sex says that a man is not altered in his being by sexual intercourse, but that the body of a woman is powerfully affected by pregnancy. A white woman pregnant with a negro child becomes a counter symbol, one of evil and pollution. —Allen Tate to Lincoln Kirstein Ida B. Wells proved prescient in her “concern” for the reputation of southern white women should white men continue to justify lynching with accusations of rape. The shifting image of the white female as it related to mob violence was slow in coming, with years of lynching still to follow Wells’s assertion in 1892, but the antilynching protest she inaugurated would eventually turn the tide of public opinion. The conflation of the white South with the image of elevated white womanhood, having served as a buffer against national opprobrium in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, began to fail in the decades between World Wars One and Two. More than any other event, the Scottsboro tragedy demonstrated the shifting relationship between the black beast image, Cash’s “lily-pure maid of Astolat,”1 and the South’s sense of identity with regard to the rest of the nation. In the spring of 1931, the Scottsboro case began, as had many similar incidents, with black males found in a compromising position with white females and the quick assumption of rape. Nine black youths, who had been in an altercation with some white youths while riding the rails, found themselves facing a deputized posse in Paint Rock, Alabama. The posse nearly turned into a lynch mob when two white women climbed down from the same rail car as the youths and claimed to have been raped. The sheriff of Jackson County prevented a lynching by first preaching law and order and subsequently presenting an armed defense of the Scottsboro jail where a mob had gathered intent on a lynching. The lynching was averted, but the youths’ guilt was clear in the court of southern white opinion. Rumors circulated around the town that the youths had gnawed off one 135 Black Beasts and the Historical Imaginations of Mitchell and Tate woman’s breast, and the headlines of a local paper read, “All Negroes Positively Identified by Girls and One White Boy Who Was Held Prisoner with Pistol and Knives While Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crime.”2 The trial began less than two weeks after the youths’ arrest and reflected public opinion. Eight of the nine were quickly sentenced to death by an all-white jury, while the trial of the ninth youth, only thirteen years old, ended with a mistrial because the jury could not agree on whether he should be put to death or spend his life in prison. In the aftermath of this first trial, the sentiments of the Jackson County (and broader southern) white population were largely self-congratulatory. By not reducing themselves to the bestiality of mob violence, they had demonstrated their quality and distanced themselves from the image of southern white racists. According to one paper, they “snubbed ‘Judge Lynch’” despite facing “the most outrageous crime in the annals of the state,” while another proclaimed, “they have saved the good name of the county and the state by remaining calm and allowing the law to take its course.”3 These reactions, and others like them, speak to the notion the white South had of itself as under siege with respect to its treatment of its African American population. The assertions stressing the indulgence of southern whites in the face of black criminality contained no indication that the “rapists ” did not deserve a grisly death at the hands of a mob; rather, they indicated that the South’s image needed a facelift more than it needed vigilante justice to control its black population. As historian Lisa Lindquist Dorr has demonstrated, such reactions to trials of accused rapists were not anomalous in the South: “Able to refrain from lynching and present an image of fairness at trial, whites assured themselves of the superiority not only of their civilization but also of the methods they used to uphold and defend it.”4 Individuals and organizations who had protested so vigorously against mob violence for the past four decades could look to this shift as evidence that their efforts had not been entirely in vain. Still, it was a shallow victory at...

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