Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America

10. Race, Honor, Citizenship: The Massie Rape/Murder Case

10 Race, Honor, Citizenship The Massie Rape/Murder Case Bonni Cermak FOR MR. AND MRS. Eustace Bellinger it had been a relatively quiet Saturday evening in Honolulu. They had spent most of that night, September 12, 1931, playing cards with their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. William Clark, and the Clarks’ son, George. In the early morning hours, the small group of friends decided to venture out for a late night snack of fresh fish chowder at the nearby Kewalo Inn. Their excursion, however , was abruptly disrupted by a distraught young woman in a green evening gown desperately signaling for the car to stop. Obligingly, Mr. Bellinger pulled over to see what the trouble was about. The woman, her face bloody and bruised, asked the party, “Are you white people?”1 Once she was assured that, yes, they were indeed white, she climbed in the car where she informed the Bellingers and the Clarks that she had been brutally attacked by a gang of Hawaiian men.2 This brief confrontation began a series of events which included two trials and a murder that has become better known as the “Massie Incident.”3 The young woman who stopped the Bellingers’ car was Thalia Massie, the wife of Lieutenant Thomas Massie, a Naval Officer stationed at Pearl Harbor. According to Mrs. Massie’s testimony, she had left a party at the Ala Wai Inn that night to get some fresh air. As she was walking down John Ena Road, four or five Hawaiian men jumped out of a car, forced her into the back seat, and drove her to an isolated area where they took turns alternately beating and raping her. The Honolulu police responded swiftly to Thalia Massie’s accusations , and before the night was over, five men had been arrested for 230 the assault: David Takai, Henry Chang, Horace Ida, Ben Ahakuelo, and Joseph Kahahawai. The case against the men, however, was weak. The investigation conducted by the Honolulu police was careless, and much of the testimony regarding the incident was contradictory. After ninety-six hours of deliberation, the jury was unable to agree on a verdict and a mistrial was declared. Before a second trial could take place, one of the accused men, Joseph Kahahawai, was murdered. After police found Kahahawai ’s body rolled up and bundled on the floor of a rental car driven by Thalia Massie’s mother, Grace Fortescue, they charged Fortescue, Thomas Massie, and two enlisted Navy men with the murder. All were brought to trial, where they were found guilty of all charges and sentenced to ten years each despite the best efforts of famed attorney Clarence Darrow, who had been hired to defend Thomas Massie. In the end, though, the prosecution’s victory was fleeting. Hawaii’s territorial Governor, Lawrence Judd, refused requests by both the United States Senate and military officials to pardon Massie, Fortescue, and the two enlisted men involved, but he unofficially sanctioned the “honor slaying ” of Kahahawai by commuting their sentences to one hour in the Governor’s office and exile from the island. Like the more notorious 1931 Scottsboro case, in which nine black men were accused of raping two white women on a westbound train to Memphis, the Massie case provides an excellent opportunity to explore constructions of race, sexuality and citizenship during the interwar period.4 In both cases the alleged sexual misconduct of nonwhites was used to reinforce racialized boundaries that protected the status and privilege of the white community. Of course, questions regarding the relationship between incidents of interracial sexual violence and race formation are not limited to these two cases. Recently, historians have begun to mine a rich vein of legal sources which allow scholars to begin to reconstruct the intimate connections between ideologies of race and sexuality. These studies have aptly demonstrated that campaigns to protect the sexual virtue of white women through both legal and extralegal means (such as lynching) effectively controlled the actions of both black men and white women. They have also shown how white men have claimed power and privilege through the rape of black women.5 Yet while studies like these offer an exciting initial examination of the historical relationship between race, sexuality, and citizenship, the RACE, HONOR, CITIZENSHIP 231 scholarship on interracial sexual relations has been largely limited to studies of the South and the dynamics of black-white interactions. In order to more fully...