For decades historians have primarily analyzed charges of blackonwhite rapein the South through accounts of lynching or manifestly unfair trialproceedings sugge... » 

For decades historians have primarily analyzed charges of blackonwhite rapein the South through accounts of lynching or manifestly unfair trialproceedings suggesting that white southerners invariably responded withextralegal violence and sham trials when white women accused black men ofassault. Lisa Lindquist Dorr challenges this view with a careful study of legalrecords newspapers and clemency files from earlytwentiethcentury Virginia.White Virginians inflammatory rhetoric she argues did not necessarilypredict black mens ultimate punishment.While trials were often grand public spectacles at which white men acted toprotect white women and to police interracial relationships Dorr points tocracks in white solidarity across class and gender lines. At the same timetrials and pardon proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities tochallenge white racial power. Taken together these cases uncover a world inwhich the mandates of segregation did not always hold sway in which whites andblacks interacted in the most intimate of ways and in which white women andwhite men saw their interests in conflict.In Dorrs account cases of blackonwhite rape illuminate the paradoxes at theheart of segregated southern society the tension between civilization andsavagery the desire for orderly and predictable racial boundaries despiteconflicts among whites and relationships across racial boundaries and thedignity of African Americans in a system dependent on their supposedinferiority. The rhetoric of protecting white women spoke of white supremacyand patriarchy but its practice revealed the limits of both. «