Gender, Race, and Rumours: Re-examining the 1943 Race Riots

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233Marilynn S. Johnson, ‘Gender, Race, and Rumours: Re-examining the 1943 Race Riots’Gender & History, Vol.10 No.2 August 1998, pp. 252–277.

Gender, Race, and Rumours: Re-examining the 1943 Race RiotsMARILYNN S. JOHNSON

In a recent roundtable in the Journal of American History, Joel Williamsondescribes the cultural and historical amnesia surrounding lynching andother forms of racial violence in the United States. Surveying the historio-graphy of lynching, he cautions scholars against retreating from the subjectand calls on them to explore lynching through ‘the nexus of sex andgender’. As his critics rightly point out, Williamson’s essay largely ignoresrecent work by women’s historians that takes precisely this approach. He is correct, however, in insisting that historians pursue a gendered analysisof racial violence. The study of urban race riots is one area where such anapproach is sorely needed.1

While historians have examined men’s and women’s participation inbread riots and other forms of pre-modern collective violence, we knowvery little about the gender dynamics of recent outbreaks of racial disorder.Those riot studies that do take gender into account have only begun to ex-plore the vast array of questions that such an approach entails. While exam-ining different forms of male and female riot participation, these workshave generally not addressed the gendered assumptions and ideologies thatunderlie racial conflicts.

This essay explores ideologies of gender and race through an analysis ofthe rumours that precipitated outbreaks of urban violence. Focusing on the World War II era, I will discuss a variety of riot types: a ‘southern-style’race riot in Beaumont, Texas (essentially a white pogrom against blacks); a‘communal riot’ in Detroit (an interracial clash involving heavy bloodshed);and a ‘commodity riot’ in Harlem (a predominantly black uprising againstpolice, accompanied by widespread looting).2 Each of these riots was ac-companied by different kinds of gendered rumours or narratives that canhelp us understand why the riots occurred in the ways they did. Moreover,when placed in the context of prevailing gender ideologies, historians’accounts of male and female riot participation become more meaningful.Because racial ideologies were closely linked with notions of manhoodand womanhood, this essay argues that race riots must be analysed throughthe lens of gender in order to be fully understood.

Before examining the gendered narratives of racial uprisings, we need toreview the historiography of urban race riots to see how men and womenhave figured in these accounts. Like so many other social issues, race riots first became a subject of historical inquiry in the 1960s. The first wave of riot historiography took its cues from social scientific investigationsof contemporary race riots and the urban neighbourhoods in which theyoccurred. Focusing on the longterm structural problems of black ghettos,these historians investigated employment, housing, social welfare, criminaljustice, and other topics to reveal how poverty and racism produced starkinequalities that fuelled outbreaks of racial violence. In their preoccupationwith structural strain, however, these studies tell us little about the socialidentities, motivations, and subjective understandings of the rioters andtheir victims, male or female. While individual women occasionally turnup in the riot narratives, one rarely finds headings for ‘women’ in theindices of these works. The race riot is generally assumed to be a malephenomenon.3

Drawing on the work of European historians such as George Rude andE. P. Thompson, a second generation of riot historians in the 1980s and1990s set out to examine the social composition and motivations of urbancrowds. The two most notable studies in this vein are Roberta Senechal’sThe Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, 1908 and DominicCapeci and Martha Wilkerson’s Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of1943. Unlike earlier works, these studies discuss the social backgrounds,motivations, and participation of women rioters. They generally do not,however, examine male rioters from a gendered perspective. Although theyoffer some intriguing demographic clues about the age, employment status,and family background of male rioters, there is no real discussion of hownotions of masculinity influenced their behaviour. As a result, we know moreabout women as gendered participants in race riots than we do about men.The following discussion, then, summarises some tentative findings on femalerioters and victims based on these accounts and fragmentary evidence fromother riot histories.4

All riot historians seem to agree that urban racial violence was a male-dominated activity. In every riot studied, women’s arrest rates were far lowerthan men’s, and they seemed to have played little role in the initial out-bursts of violence. In the Springfield riot of 1908 and the Detroit riot of1943, women made up less than 5 per cent of those arrested. Althoughwomen’s share of riot-related arrests increased in the 1960s, averaging 10.9 per cent in the racial disorders studied by the Kerner Commission,their arrest rates remained far below those of men. However, as Robert M.Fogelson and Robert B. Hill explained in their study of 1960s riot participa-tion, there is a significant discrepancy between the gender breakdown ofarrest rates and those of riot participation surveys. In a survey following the1967 Detroit riot, for example, 39 per cent of all self-reported participantswere women, compared to only 12.6 per cent of arrestees. In a survey of

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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998.

the Watts riot in 1965, women and girls made up fully one half of all self-reported riot participants while accounting for just 13 per cent of thosearrested. Such findings suggest that arrest statistics are probably not a reli-able indicator of female participation. The low percentage of female arresteesno doubt reflects the gendered assumptions of police who identified blackmales as the main source of social disorder. Historians’ reliance on arreststatistics, then, has tended to minimise women’s roles in these disordersand has contributed to the view of racial rioting as a male-dominatedactivity.5

It might be more accurate to describe race rioting as a sequence ofevents with differing patterns of male and female participation. Eyewitnessaccounts, photographic evidence, and arrest records all suggest that menwere generally responsible for the initial outbreaks of violence and tendedto dominate the early stages of rioting. Once underway, however, riotsdrew large crowds of participants and onlookers, including many womenand girls. Female participation in looting was particularly evident. During the1960s uprisings, eyewitnesses reported a large number of female looters,and police statistics revealed a disproportionately high number of womenarrested for burglary and theft. Earlier riots show a similar pattern. Amongwomen arrested in the Springfield and Detroit (1943) riots, the majoritywere apprehended for looting. In fact, the increase in women’s arrest ratesin Detroit between the 1943 and 1967 riots roughly correlates with theincrease in the rates of arrest for looting.6 It is possible, then, that the shiftfrom communal type disorders of the early twentieth century to thecommodity riots of the 1960s has led to a corresponding rise in femaleparticipation.

Women’s socialisation as consumers, coupled with their relative economicdeprivation, probably accounts for the tendency to engage in commodity-oriented riot activities. Female arrestees in the 1943 Detroit riot were dis-proportionately single, divorced, separated, or widowed and were morelikely to be unemployed or employed in low-paying service jobs than weretheir male counterparts. Given this background, historians have concludedthat women’s (and particularly black women’s) economically and sociallymarginal position has been a key motivation for rioting. As in earlier breadriots, women stole openly and unashamedly, claiming a moral right tocertain commodities. But unlike bread rioters, women looters did not usu-ally take food but mainly clothing, appliances, furniture, and other durablegoods. This suggests that it was not starvation that drove rioters’ actions buta relative level of economic deprivation in a modern consumer-orientedsociety. Nor were their motivations strictly economic, as riot participantsurveys of the 1960s have shown. Women, like men, looted for a variety ofreasons – racial resentment, political protest, opportunism, or a combina-tion of these and other factors.7

While looting has been the dominant activity of female rioters since the1960s, women’s experiences in earlier southern-style and communal riots

254 Gender and History


were more varied. In addition to looting, women frequently became victimsand combatants in these conflicts. In virtually all of the major race riots ofthe early twentieth century, women of both races were among those in-jured, killed, or left homeless. Likewise, many female arrestees proved tobe the victims of racial attacks. Female fatalities were reported in the riotsof East St Louis (1917), Tulsa (1921), and Detroit (1943). In the Springfieldriot of 1908, fourteen of eighty-three victims identified by Roberta Senechalwere women who lost homes or other property. Women were also thevictims of brutal beatings by crowds in Atlanta (1906), Springfield, East St Louis, and Detroit (1943) – to name a few.8

On occasion, however, women became active defenders and com-batants in street rioting. In the Detroit uprising of 1943, most black womenarrested for rioting (other than looting) were apprehended while trying to protect family members or loved ones from white rioters or police. In theNew Orleans (1900) and Springfield riots, individual white women inter-vened to protect black neighbours from hostile white crowds. And in a fewinstances, both black and white women became active agents or leaders ofracial violence, launching physical attacks against their adversaries in anattempt to ‘defend’ their womanhood and their race.9

These accounts suggest that women rioters did not step outside pre-scribed female roles but rather fulfilled societal expectations as consumers,victims, and protectors. These same accounts, however, offer glimpses ofunderlying sexual and gender ideologies at work in these disturbances thatbeg for further analysis. To understand the full significance of riot behaviour,we need to examine how notions of gender helped shape race relationsand conflict in the first place. As with lynching, the immediate precipitantsof urban race riots often involved incidents or allegations of rape or otheratrocities against women that drew on collective racial memories. Whennews of these events spread – recaptured and reformulated through rumour– men of the victim’s racial group took to the streets seeking vengeance. AsJacquelyn Dowd Hall has demonstrated in her work on lynching, we needto examine these rumours as gendered narratives with extraordinary sym-bolic power.10 In so doing, we can see how ideologies of race and gendercame together to help spark outbreaks of collective violence.

While historians have examined the rumours preceding individual riots,sociologists and folklorists have provided a broader analysis of the role ofrumour in racial disturbances. The major work on this subject is Terry AnnKnopf’s Rumors, Race and Riots (1975), a study of rumours in the race riotsof the 1960s. Dismissing mechanistic views of rumour as either cause oreffect of violence, Knopf sees rumour and rioting as ‘part of the sameprocess’ of racial conflict. Specifically, she finds riot-related rumours, likethe riots themselves, to be based on tenets of the ‘hostile belief systems’ ofeach race. Examining rumours from dozens of racial disturbances, Knopfidentifies several common and recurring themes – including rape and atro-cities – that she sees as expressions of these racial beliefs. By ‘crystallizing,



confirming, and intensifying hostile beliefs, while linking them to actualevents’, she argues, ‘rumors often provide the “proof” necessary for massmobilization’. By seeing rumour as an expression of what Barbara J. Fieldshas more recently termed ‘racial ideologies’, Knopf draws a more nuancedpicture of the relationship between rumour and collective violence.11

Through this approach, we can begin to understand how riot participantsunderstood precipitating incidents and why they responded with violence.In other ways, however, Knopf’s analysis falls short. As a social scientistconcerned with data collection, categorisation, and quantification, shetends to see belief systems as timeless and self-evident. The origins andmeanings of such beliefs remain obscure.

More promising in this regard is the work of folklorists who have studied rumour as contemporary legend. In her book on rumour in African-American culture, Patricia Turner examines rumours as cultural texts ornarratives linking the fate of black bodies to the fate of the black race. She traces these metaphors back to early African-European contact to show how historical experience and collective memory inform present-dayrumours of racial conspiracy and genocide. Her work thus offers a tech-nique for analysing the content of rumours and for understanding whycertain rumour themes recur over time. But rumours, like the racial ideo-logies they represent, are not autonomous entities that periodically emergeto ignite race riots. They derive their power not only from tradition and his-torical memory but from the social context in which they are embedded.12

It is the role of the historian to explicate this context so that we mayunderstand not just the origin and meaning of a given rumour but why itwields the symbolic power to spark violence under certain conditions.

The World War II era provides a good opportunity to explore the role ofrumour and precipitating incidents in race riots. With widespread fear ofenemy subversion and fifth column activity on the home front, federal andlocal authorities were particularly attuned to rumour formation and duti-fully recorded its occurrence. Using these sources carefully, the historiancan reconstruct precipitating incidents and their various interpretationsthrough rumour by different groups within the community. The World WarII period was also pivotal in the evolution of race rioting in the twentiethcentury. In the summer of 1943 alone, five major racial disturbances struckUS defence centres, representing several different riot types. Using casestudies of riots in three cities – Beaumont, Detroit, and New York – we canexamine a range of riot types that share the larger context of wartime racialtension but offer different variants on and understandings of that experi-ence at the local level.

The Beaumont riot of 15–16 June 1943 is the least well known of themajor racial conflagrations of World War II.13 Erupting less than a monthafter the Mobile, Alabama shipyard riot and only a few days before thebloody outbreak in Detroit, the Beaumont riot has been relegated tohistorical obscurity, often cited but rarely discussed. Yet the pattern of this



riot, including its precipitating events and rumours, was a familiar one insouthern and midwestern cities during the early twentieth century. TheBeaumont riot was in fact one of the last examples of a southern-style raceriot in which white rioters violently attacked the local African-Americancommunity in defence of white supremacist principles. An examination ofthis episode offers insight into these earlier racial disorders and the ration-ale of whites who instigated them.

Located eighty miles east of Houston near the Louisiana border, Beau-mont became one of the premier war boom towns in Texas. Like many GulfCoast cities, it experienced phenomenal population growth with the expan-sion of shipbuilding and petroleum production during the war. Beaumont’slargest defence contractor, the Pennsylvania Shipyards, employed morethan 8,000 workers at peak production, while Consolidated Steel Shipyardsin nearby Orange, Texas, maintained a wartime payroll of more than 20,000.Drawing workers from small towns and rural areas in east Texas andLouisiana, Beaumont’s population surged from 59,000 in 1940 to around80,000 in 1943. As in the pre-war period, about a third of the city’sresidents were African-American.14

Wartime population growth placed severe strains on housing, trans-portation, healthcare, and other social services. Such pressures threatenedthe rigid racial boundaries that had long characterised public life in Beau-mont and other east Texas communities. Public transportation proved the most volatile area of conflict as overcrowding threatened segregationarrangements on city buses. In January 1943, following a series of beatings,shootings, and other violent altercations between black passengers andwhite bus drivers, the city authorised the use of separate carriers for blackand white passengers. Tensions also ran high at the Pennsylvania Shipyards,where an influx of black workers caused widespread resentment among the company’s white employees, many of them newcomers themselves.Finally, the scheduling of a controversial local election prompted rumoursof an armed black uprising on 19 June, or Juneteenth, the day when blackTexans traditionally celebrated emancipation.15

While rumours of a Juneteenth uprising served to heighten racial ten-sions in the city, reports that a black man had raped a young white womanon 5 June raised racial animosities to a fever pitch. According to police, aneighteen-year-old telephone operator was brutally raped, beaten, and stabbedin a downtown warehouse while walking home from work around mid-night. During the assault, her assailant reportedly told her that ‘the army isgoing to get me, and if I do this, I’ll get killed … and the army won’t getme’. A little later, the woman escaped and ran home to her parents, whocalled the police. Returning to the scene, the police shot and wounded afleeing suspect named Curtis Thomas, a twenty-four-year-old defence workerand ex-convict. Police transported Thomas to the hospital, where he al-legedly confessed to the attack. The incident received front-page coveragein both Beaumont dailies, and by the next morning, a lynch mob of some



150 white men gathered outside the hospital. Informing the crowd thatThomas would soon die anyway, Police Chief Ross Dickey convinced thecrowd to disperse. Deputies moved the suspect to the city jail where hedied two days later.16

Although mob violence had been averted, the Thomas case crystallisedfears of black insurrection, shaping them into familiar stereotypes of black male lust and criminality. According to a Beaumont police captain,rumour-mongering radically increased after this event. New variants on thetheme of black insurrection appeared, including rumours that black soldierswere planning to invade the city in search of unprotected white women.Victor Bernstein, a writer for the progressive New York newspaper PM,reported that many of Beaumont’s white women were warned to stay awayfrom downtown that week because ‘there’s nigger mobs on the street’. Moregeneralised fears of black insurrection thus combined with longstandingwhite anxieties about rape, miscegenation, and the protection of whitewomanhood.17

Given this convergence, it is not surprising that a second rape allegationserved as the spark for the 16 June riot. Around 2 p.m. on 15 June, policereceived a call from a twenty-four-year-old white woman charging that ablack transient had raped her in her home on the outskirts of town. Thewoman, a war worker’s wife and mother of three, said that the man hadcome to her door asking for water and work, explaining that he had cometo the area to answer a draft board call but had been rejected. She put himto work weeding the victory garden, she said, and fed him lunch. After sheput her children to bed for their afternoon naps, the man allegedly used asharpened file to force her into another room where he sexually assaultedher. After the man fled, she contacted police, who launched a search of thesurrounding area.

Rumours of the alleged rape spread like wildfire and were particularlyprevalent among workers at the Pennsylvania Shipyards. At nine o’clockthat evening, some 2,000 workers put down their tools and marched information out of the yards to the police station downtown. Justifying their action, one mob member said, ‘Our duty is for the protection of ourhomes’. Upon reaching police headquarters, the mob had grown to around3,000 and demanded that police hand over the rape suspect believed to beinside. Chief Dickey attempted to disperse the crowd and finally producedthe alleged rape victim who addressed the crowd from the front steps. Sheassured them that she had toured the jail and that the suspect was notthere. The crowd, however, became increasingly restless and eventuallyheaded for the city’s two black districts.18

Fifteen hours of rioting, arson, and looting ensued. Focusing their wrathon the black neighbourhoods along Gladys and Forsythe Streets, whiterioters beat and robbed black pedestrians, overturned cars, and burned andlooted dozens of black-owned homes and businesses. By morning, the act-ing Texas governor declared martial law and began mobilising more than



3,000 state guards, Texas Rangers, and military personnel. All told, the riotresulted in three fatalities (two black, one white), more than 200 injuries,the partial or total destruction of some 200 buildings, and a loss of anestimated 210,000 labour hours of essential war production. The labourpool was in fact permanently depleted as more than 2,000 black residentsleft Beaumont over the next few days.19

The alleged rape which ignited the riot, however, remained shrouded inmystery. Although newspaper reports prior to the riot referred to the assaultas an uncontested fact, the Beaumont Enterprise soon began to use morecautious language, referring to a ‘report of rape’ and an ‘alleged’ attack.News reports further revealed that police had failed to uncover any finger-prints or material evidence at the woman’s home and that a medical exam-ination of the victim conducted the day of the alleged assault revealed noindication of sexual intercourse. The medical examination, according to alater report by a local police captain, was ordered because there ‘was somequestion with reference to the testimony’. He noted that the woman hadchanged her story, first claiming that the attack had occurred in the garden,then later in the kitchen. He concluded that the rape was ‘an illusion of hermind to create an added bit of excitement and to obtain a large amount of publicity’. Another informant for the NAACP who interviewed policeclaimed that ‘none of the officers … believe that the woman was raped’.The woman, a Louisiana-born migrant who had arrived in Beaumont withher family a few weeks earlier, quietly left town after the riot.20

Despite the highly questionable aspects of the case, white Beaumonterswere quick to believe and act on the rape rumours. Their readiness to ac-cept such rumours was hardly unusual; the Beaumont uprising was merelyone example in a long tradition of rioting precipitated by alleged interracialrape. Racial disturbances in Atlanta in 1906, Springfield in 1908, Omahaand Washington, DC, in 1919, Tulsa in 1921, and Mobile in 1943 – toname only a few – were all sparked by rumoured incidents of rape or ‘rapeepidemics’ involving black men. In her study of riot rumours amongwhites, Terry Ann Knopf found that rape rumours preceded the outbreak of nearly half of all major race riots in the United States between 1917 and1943.21

The rape accounts behind these riots are urban versions of the traditionalrape-lynching narrative of the post-Civil War South. Although less than aquarter of all lynching victims were even accused of rape, the spectre ofthe black rapist and the need to protect white womanhood became thecommon rationale for mob violence during these years. In the vocabularyof post-Civil War white supremacy, rape or rumours of rape came torepresent a wide variety of economic, political, and social fears concerningAfrican-Americans. As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has argued, the associationbetween rape and lynching conjured up powerful racial and sexual images:‘the black rapist, “a monstrous beast, crazed with lust”; the white victim –young, blond, virginal; [and] her manly Anglo-Saxon avengers’. The image



of the black beast dates back to early African-European contact and whiteperceptions of Africa as a land of licentiousness inhabited by primitivepeoples with overly large sex organs. As George Frederickson explains,such images were incorporated into a pro-slavery ideology which depictedblack men as ‘docile and amiable when enslaved and ferocious andmurderous when free’. In the post-war era, black emancipation rekindledfears of black bestiality and the lurking danger that transient black menposed to the white ‘daughters of the Confederacy’, including defencelesswidows and orphans. White fears of black male sexuality, Martha Hodesargues, were conflated with fears of black political power and black men’s claims to citizenship and manhood. To protect white political powerand the integrity of the race, white male avengers took up the lynch rope.The rape-lynching narrative, then, reflected a power struggle among menin which women and sex were the means of communication. It was, asHall puts it, a story white Southerners told about themselves and others thatdramatised the need for racial hierarchy and white male supremacy.22

Not coincidentally, lynching and the rape narrative which accompaniedit peaked around the turn of the century as white Southerners sought toinstitutionalise Jim Crow segregation and witnessed the emergence of avisible women’s rights movement. The confluence of these trends illustratesthe degree to which the structure of segregation was built around notionsof gender and how the emergence of feminism threatened both gender andracial hierarchies. Indeed, the rape-lynching narrative delivered a messageof intimidation not only to black men but to black and white women aswell. For black women, who were often victims of sexual abuse by whitemen, the lynching of black males raised the spectre of their own economicand sexual vulnerability. Women who attempted to defend their husbandsor sons from malicious charges were themselves sometimes punished withrape or lynching. For white women, the rape-lynching narrative cast themas potentially frail, humiliated victims who were ‘ruined for life’ and for-ever in the debt of their male avengers. It also masked uneasiness withwhite women’s sexual desires, denying even the suggestion of consensualrelations between ‘respectable’ white women and black men. In the con-text of a growing assertiveness on the part of southern women, the rape-lynching narrative served as a cautionary tale of female sexual vulnerabilityand subordination.23

But why does this sexual narrative re-emerge so explosively in Beaumontand other southern defence centres during World War II? Over the courseof the twentieth century, the number of lynchings had gradually declined,particularly in urban areas, and tapered to a trickle after World War II.Although the long-term effects of migration and industrialisation contri-buted to the eventual decline of lynching, the short-term impact of wartimedevelopment and urban growth created social tensions that threatenedracial and sexual hierarchies in southern defence centres. At a time whenwomen entered the workforce in record numbers and when adult males



were frequently drawn away by military service or defence work, racialconflicts over jobs and public accommodations could easily translate intoa preoccupation with sexual transgression. In fact, many of the racial alter-cations in wartime shipyards and transportation lines revolved around allegedunseemly contact between black men and white women. Furthermore, theinflux of thousands of poor white Southerners – many of whom migratedfrom rural areas where lynching was still common – helped revitalise therape-lynching narrative. According to the sociologist Katherine Archibald,southern white migrants were ‘especially disturbed by and found it hard to accept the casual contact between Negro men and white women …Tales of lynching with a background of sexual ravishment were much indemand’.24

Unlike earlier rape-lynching narratives, the rape rumours that sparkedthe Beaumont riot reflected the particular social context of World War II.In both the 5 June and 15 June rape accounts, the black suspects were notonly transients (as in traditional rape narratives) but draft dodgers as well.The press particularly trumpeted Curtis Thomas’s alleged remark that hewould rather rape and be killed than go into the army. The notion of blackdraft dodging meshed neatly with other wartime rumours that gangs ofblack men were poised to invade the city in search of unprotected whitewomen.25 The myth of the draft-dodging rapist, then, was an ambiguousone: it cast black men as vicious, oversexed male brutes while simul-taneously impugning black masculinity and patriotism. By contrast, whiterioters saw themselves as noble protectors of hearth and home, patrioticdefence workers who were forced to lay down their tools to avenge thehonour of their women. Reflecting white resentments over new social and economic opportunities available to black civilians, the story of thedraft-dodging rapist was a sexualised allegory of black assertiveness andadvancement on the home front and white efforts to defend the status quo.

Images of white women in the Beaumont rape narratives also reflectedwartime tensions around changing gender relations. The first victim, anineteen-year-old woman who lived with her parents, seemed to fit theclassic image of the young white virgin (although her sexual history wasnever explicitly discussed). But her employment as a nightshift worker andthe circumstances of her assault pointed to the dangers of women’s newwartime roles. Alone and vulnerable on dark city streets, the female warworker enjoyed new freedom but also invited sexual assault and violence.The rape victim’s plight served to remind working women of their ownvulnerability and to set limits on their new autonomy.26 By contrast, thesecond alleged victim was a young wife of a war worker, portrayed by the press as a dutiful homemaker and mother. At home with her childrenin an isolated house while her husband worked long hours in a localdefence plant, she symbolised the precarious status of women left to shiftfor themselves during the war. Reflecting the anxieties of men who leftfamilies behind to take up defence work or military service, the saga of the



housewife victim also served as a warning to married women to exercisecaution and fidelity in their husbands’ absence. In both versions, the rapestory served as a cautionary tale to women whose economic and socialautonomy had grown appreciably during the war years. Given the very realdangers of sexual assault for women and the increased levels of violencewhich characterise wartime, such accounts were powerful and effectivereminders of female vulnerability.

Understanding the symbolic power of the rape narrative in southern-style race riots can help us make sense of women’s experiences in thoseuprisings. Unfortunately details of the Beaumont riot are sketchy at best,and the nature of women’s role in that event remains a mystery. Historians’accounts of other southern-style riots, however, contain intriguing informa-tion on women victims and rioters. Among the victims, women whose racialidentity was ambiguous or who were engaged in interracial relationshipswere particularly at risk. During the Springfield riot of 1908, for example,a light-skinned African-American woman and her darker skinned husbandreceived repeated death threats from local whites, prompting the husbandto stand guard out front with a shotgun. The man’s response was under-standable, for among the well-known riot victims was William Donnegan,an elderly black man married to a young white woman. In another case, an angry white crowd torched the home of a white Springfield womanbecause ‘it was said that she was living with a Negro’.27 Acting on the gend-ered assumptions of the rape narrative which had sparked the riot, whitecrowds targeted black men and women of either race who transgressedracial and sexual boundaries (or were perceived as doing so).

By the same token, white women who actively participated in physicalassaults on blacks did so ostensibly in defence of white womanhood. Per-haps the most infamous female rioter was Kate Howard, a white boarding-house owner who became a ringleader in the Springfield riot. Dubbed‘Joan of Arc’ by the local press, Howard reportedly led an angry whitecrowd in attacking a restaurant owned by Harry Loper, a prominent whitebusinessman who had helped police transport two black rape suspects outof the city to avert a lynching. Howard allegedly taunted the male crowd,saying, ‘What the hell are you fellows afraid of? Women want protection,and this seems to be the only way to get it’. The crowd obliged by ran-sacking and burning Loper’s restaurant and automobile, killing one youngwhite man in the process. Howard was later arrested and charged withmurder. Melodramatic to the end, she imbibed poison and collapsed anddied on the steps of the county jail.28 Admittedly Howard’s story is unusual,but her impassioned defence of white womanhood was a central com-ponent in the race–gender ideology of many southern-style riots.

Although not as flamboyant as Howard, white women in other southern-style riots also led assaults on blacks. Less than a month before the Beau-mont riot, the upgrading of several black welders – along with rumours that a black shipyard worker had raped a white woman – sparked a day of



rioting in a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard. Observers of the riot were particu-larly struck by the number of white women who joined in attacking blackmale workers, hitting them with bricks and iron bars.29 For these womenand their male accomplices, resentment over black economic advance-ment was expressed in sexual terms; they attacked black workers to ‘protectwhite womanhood’ from the threat of occupational integration. Althoughwomen were not always visible participants in southern-style riots, theMemphis and Springfield examples show that white women often joinedwith male rioters in enforcing the gender ideology of the rape narrative.

While the rape theme continued to fuel fears of racial violence amongwhites, new types of incidents and rumours emerged as precipitants in theblack-led riots of the post-war era. Here again, the racial disturbances of1943, particularly those in Detroit and Harlem, can offer insight on the per-ceptions of urban rioters. The Detroit riot, characterised by mutual animosityand violence among blacks and whites, provides an especially revealingexample of rumour formation and its role in crystallising racial unrest.

The Detroit uprising of June 1943 was one of the most serious and best-documented riots in American history. Lasting four days, 20–23 June,the riot left thirty-four dead, more than 765 injured, and an estimated $2 million in property damage. Somewhat belatedly, the governor declaredmartial law and called in some 3,200 military and state police to restoreorder. Government commissions, social scientists, and historians have ana-lysed the riot from a variety of perspectives, so for this reason I will provideonly a brief overview of its background and origins.30

With its vast automotive industry, Detroit became the nation’s largest andmost productive defence centre of World War II. The Detroit metropolitanarea secured billions of dollars in federal defence contracts and attractednearly half a million migrant defence workers, mainly from the upper Southand Midwest. As in Beaumont, African-Americans made up a large seg-ment of the new population, and racial tensions around housing, employ-ment, transportation, and other facilities soon escalated. Between 1941 andearly 1943, racial clashes occurred at the Ford River Rouge plant, North-western High School, the Sojourner Truth housing project, and otherlocations. White supremacist groups like the Christian Front and the KuKlux Klan aggravated racial tensions by fomenting anti-black activities suchas the hate strikes that paralysed the Packard engine factory just a fewweeks before the riot. By the summer of 1943, Detroit was a racial tinder-box waiting to explode.31

The explosion came on Sunday, 20 June on the Belle Isle Bridge. Withtemperatures topping ninety degrees, thousands of Detroit residents headedfor the beaches and recreation areas on Belle Isle, a park within easy reachof the city’s downtown working-class neighbourhoods. In the course of theday, isolated racial fights broke out between black and white park visitorsover picnic tables, grills, alleged thefts, and other issues. Around 10.45 thatevening on the Belle Isle Bridge, another altercation broke out among black



and white youths that quickly escalated into a mêlée involving hundreds ofcivilians and sailors from the nearby naval armoury. Police responded and dis-persed the crowds, but fighting resumed later as rumours of the bridge incidentcirculated in both black and white neighbourhoods. These later outbreaksspread quickly; by the early morning hours a full-scale riot was underway.32

The nature of the rumours varied by race, following parallel but inversenarrative paths. (Folklorist Patricia Turner calls this phenomenon a ‘Topsy–Eva’ cycle, a term based on the popular nineteenth-century doll depictingthe young female characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the angelic white Evaon one side, the piccaninny Topsy on the other.) In an attempt to interpretthe confusing events that transpired on the Belle Isle Bridge, both blacksand whites constructed rumours that reflected their own racial ideologies.In the white neighbourhood along Woodward Avenue, rumours circulatedthat ‘a Negro had raped a white woman on Belle Island’. Army intelligencealso reported heavy telephone traffic among whites passing rumours thatblacks had slit a white sailor’s throat and raped his girlfriend.33 As in Beau-mont, white rioters articulated their racial resentments in the traditionallanguage of the rape narrative. The social identity of the victims – a sailorand his girlfriend – suggested an attack on both noble white manhood andinnocent white womanhood.

In the nearby black district of Paradise Valley, a somewhat differentversion of the rumour emerged. At approximately 12.30 a.m., a young manseized the microphone at the Forest Club, a popular black nightspot, andurged the 500 patrons to take up arms against whites who had ‘thrown acolored lady and her baby’ off the Belle Isle Bridge. His remarks echoedrumours already circulating in the area that white sailors had ‘thrown aNegro woman and her baby into the lake’.34 In many ways, the black rumoursparalleled the white ones with a simple inversion of villains and victims.But there were important differences as well. In the white versions, thefemale victim was a young white woman defiled by black rapists; in the blackversions, a white mob drowned and/or killed a black mother and child.

Like the violation of the white virgin in the rape-lynching narrative, thevictimisation of the black mother/child has been a recurrent theme in riot-related rumours among African-Americans. In the Chicago race riot of 1919,a mutually combative conflict much like the Detroit uprising, the ChicagoCommission on Race Relations reported that ‘Chief among the anger-provoking rumours were tales of injury done to women of the race cir-culating the rumor’. The press helped disseminate these rumours, includingthe black-owned Chicago Defender which published an erroneous butwidely circulated account of a white mob’s attack on a young black motherand child:

An unidentified young woman and three-months-old baby were found deadon the street at the intersection of Forty-seventh and Wentworth. She had at-tempted to board a car there when the mob seized her, beat her, slashed her



body to ribbons, and beat the baby’s brains out against a telegraph pole. Notsatisfied with this one rioter severed her breasts and a white youngster boreit aloft on a pole triumphantly while the crowd hooted gleefully.35

In this graphic and horrifying narrative, whites did not simply kill an inno-cent black mother and child, but took sensual pleasure in their atrocities.Scenes of violent infanticide and the dismemberment and defeminisationof black female bodies served as powerful and shocking images of racialgenocide.

While there is little concrete evidence of how African-Americans inter-preted this rumour narrative, it is likely that its meanings and implicationswere somewhat different for men and women. For women, the atrocitystory inspired both fear of and anger toward white aggressors. As theprotectors of innocent children, black women would no doubt be outragedby this account and justified in striking back against such brutal attacks. AsDominic Capeci and Martha Wilkerson show, a number of black womenwere in fact arrested for carrying weapons intended to defend themselvesand their families; others were charged with assault or disorderly conductfor clashing with police or white passersby.36 At the same time, however,black women were also portrayed as vulnerable to white male violence. Indepicting black women as victims of mutilation and sexual sadism, therumour narrative was a cautionary tale that warned them away from thestreets and potential encounters with hostile whites (a strategy in fact fol-lowed by most women during the riot). For black men, the meaning of therumour was less ambiguous. As a male narrative of white racist aggression,the mother/child atrocity story was meant to inspire violent retaliation byblack men in defence of their women and families.

Although not all rumours concerning black women featured the mother/child dyad (some were black versions of the traditional rape narrative), thematernal motif has been more prevalent.37 The symbolic power of the blackmother/child image is deeply rooted in the collective experience and mem-ory of African-Americans dating back to the slavery era and earlier. Manyanthropologists, for instance, have stressed the prominent role of the mother–child relationship in traditional West African tribal societies. Feminist his-torians, who stress the centrality of black women’s economic contributionsand communal support networks to the slave family, suggest that African-American women adapted matrifocal arrangements as a means of copingwith the repressive realities of chattel slavery. Even historians who defendthe notion of a patriarchal two-parent slave family acknowledge its fragility.Although slaves devised creative strategies for keeping family networksintact, slave owners ultimately held the power to break up slave familiesthrough sales, relocation, and the sexual appropriation of slave women.38

Under such conditions, a strong mother–child bond was an importantsurvival mechanism, but one which could leave black men in an uncom-fortable and sometimes powerless position. Black men’s inability to protect



their mothers, wives, and children from the abuse of white slaveholderswas a recurrent theme in slave narratives and fiction. Well into the twentiethcentury, African-American men continued to express anger and frustrationwith white men’s abuse of and disrespect for black women. W. E. B. DuBois,in what was perhaps the most famous statement of this sentiment, said thatwhile he would forgive the white South for slavery, the Civil War, and white supremacy, he would never forgive ‘its wanton and continued andpersistent insulting of black womanhood.’39

Even after emancipation, when black men and women sought refuge ina patriarchal, family-based sharecropping system, the spectre of mob vio-lence threatened the sanctity of black homes. ‘Rebellious’ black men werelynched, while women who defended them likewise faced the prospect ofrape or lynching. In the annals of the anti-lynching movement, some of themost shocking and gruesome narratives involved the lynching andmutilation of black women. In Walter White’s investigation for the NAACP,for example, he described the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, a Georgiawoman who dared to protest her husband’s lynching some days earlier:

Securely they bound her ankles together and, by them, hanged her to a tree.Gasoline and motor oil were thrown upon her dangling clothes; a matchwrapped her in sudden flames. Mocking, ribald laughter from her tormentorsanswered the helpless woman’s screams of pain and terror … The clothesburned from her crisply toasted body, in which, unfortunately, life stilllingered, a man stepped towards the woman and, with his knife, ripped openthe abdomen in a crude Caesarean operation. Out tumbled the prematurelyborn child. Two feeble cries it gave – and received for answer the heel of astalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form.40

The story of Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time of her death,bears an obvious and eerie resemblance to the mother/child atrocityrumour that circulated during the Chicago race riot the following year. The repetition of certain powerful images – the savage mutilation of thewoman’s body and the crushing of her baby – suggest that elements of theChicago riot rumour were crafted from the Turner lynching account. In-deed, the widespread awareness of the Turner lynching in Chicago’s blackcommunity probably contributed to the power and seeming authenticity ofthe 1919 riot rumour.

Although less graphic, the black version of the Belle Isle Bridge rumourrepresents a continuation of this theme of black male outrage over whiteviolence against women and children. But why does the mother/childatrocity story re-emerge in so incendiary a fashion in wartime Detroit? Mostobviously, racial tensions in the city had reached a critical level by mid-1943, fostered in part by a growing number of overt and aggressive actsof white racism. Hate strikes, violent protests against integrated housing,and increasingly open organising among white supremacist groups con-vinced many blacks in Detroit that white racism threatened not only their



livelihoods but their homes, families, and neighbourhoods. In this tenseclimate, the mother/child atrocity story served as an allegory of white racistaggression, expressing deeply rooted fears of racial genocide.

In Detroit, as in Beaumont, the wartime alteration of women’s rolesenhanced the emotional power of female atrocity rumours. Since the latenineteenth century, both northern and southern cities had been character-ised by relatively high levels of female-headed black households due to thegreater availability of urban service employment for women and higherunemployment and death rates among black men. The visibility of female-headed households was especially high, however, during World Wars I andII as black urban migration rates soared and many African-American menleft for the military. During these years, the black mother/child image wasemblematic of the sweeping demographic changes affecting Detroit andother defence centres.

The changing occupational status of black women during the war yearsalso fuelled growing racial resentments. Although black women faced sub-stantial barriers in entering industrial and clerical sectors of the workforce,they did make significant gains in institutional service industries such aslaundry, food services, and custodial work. For those who migrated to Detroitand other war production centres, they also found a small but growingnumber of jobs in blue collar defence industries. Given these new oppor-tunities, many black women abandoned domestic service for other jobs or demanded better pay and working conditions to stay. Even those whoremained in menial service positions, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo argues,created alternate sources of status and identity as homemakers and com-munity workers in war housing projects and other woman-centred spaces.The new assertiveness of black women during the war gave rise to wide-spread white rumours of ‘Disappointment Clubs’ and ‘Eleanor Clubs’.Named after the civil rights-minded first lady, these alleged secret societiesof black domestics supposedly sought to usurp the privileges of their white mistresses or purposely disrupt white households through quitting orabsenteeism.41 While African-Americans might laugh at these paranoiddelusions, they also understood the resentment many whites harbouredtoward black women who dared turn their labour and attention toward theirown families. In this context, then, the mother/child atrocity story can beread as a narrative of white repression of black womanhood at a time whenAfrican-American women were asserting demands for better jobs andstruggling, often alone, to support their families. For black men who tookto the streets of Detroit on 20 June, rumours of the Belle Isle Bridge atro-cities served as a familiar rallying cry for the protection of black wives,mothers, and children – but one that was particularly resonant during thewar years.

The theme of protecting black women and children took a somewhatdifferent form in the rumours that circulated prior to the Harlem riot a fewmonths later. In this case, the precipitating incident was the shooting of a



black serviceman by a white police officer in the lobby of the BraddockHotel on West 126th Street. The altercation began on the evening of 1 August when a white police officer arrested a young black woman fordisorderly conduct. In the midst of the arrest, a second woman, FlorineRoberts, intervened in the dispute. Roberts was a domestic from Connecti-cut who had come to Harlem to see her son, Robert Bandy, a twenty-six-year-old black military policeman on leave from the Army’s 703 Battalionin Jersey City. Returning to retrieve her luggage at the hotel, Roberts wit-nessed the arrest and demanded that the officer release the young woman.Before long, Roberts’s son also intervened, and a violent struggle ensued inwhich Bandy allegedly seized Collins’s nightstick and hit him with it whileCollins responded by shooting Bandy in the shoulder. Both men were takento Sydenham Hospital, but none of the injuries proved life-threatening.42

Nevertheless, Harlem was soon abuzz with rumours that ‘a white copkilled a black soldier’. The rumours emphasised that Bandy had been shottrying to ‘protect his mother’ and had been killed ‘in the presence of hismother’. Over the next few hours, angry black crowds gathered outside the hospital, the hotel, and the twenty-eighth precinct house. After policemoved Collins from the hospital to the police station, over 3,000 people sur-rounded the building and threatened to seize the officer. Before long, angrymobs began throwing bricks and bottles, overturning cars, fighting withpolice, smashing windows, and looting stores. The rioting continued throughthe night, gradually abating as thousands of police, military personnel, anddeputised black volunteers occupied the streets. In the course of thistwelve-hour disturbance, there were six deaths, 185 injuries, 550 arrests,and at least a quarter of a million dollars in property damage.43

In many ways, the structural sources of the Harlem riot were similar tothose of Detroit and Beaumont: accelerated black migration and popu-lation growth, discriminatory employment practices, overcrowded housingand recreational facilities, and wartime profiteering by local merchants. In this context, rumours of the Braddock Hotel incident constituted yetanother version of the mother/child atrocity story in which racist threats tothe black community were expressed through the metaphor of the mother/child dyad. In this account, the son was not a child but an adult male whoacted out the traditional theme of protecting black womanhood. His mother,though not physically harmed, was emotionally brutalised in witnessingthe killing of her son.

Ultimately, though, the Braddock Hotel rumour cast women in support-ing roles, placing greater emphasis on threats to black masculinity. Imagesof embattled black manhood were particularly resonant in wartime Harlemand were rooted in a popular discourse on black crime and police vio-lence. For many years, local residents had complained of police brutalityagainst black citizens, often young black men whom police viewed as thesource of Harlem’s crime problem. During World War II, the fight againstpolice violence took on new urgency as white-owned newspapers whipped



up public hysteria over alleged ‘crime waves’ among blacks and demandedtougher policing of the city’s black districts. At the same time, numerousbeatings and killings of black servicemen by white civilian police, particu-larly in the South, heightened black awareness of police violence aroundthe country. Accounts of these outrages were widely publicised in the blackpress, and Harlem leaders were quick to draw parallels to local cases.Harlem City Councilmember Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, was one of the mostvocal critics of police brutality, describing it as a likely riot precipitantsome six weeks before the 1 August outbreak.44

Considering the volatility of the police brutality issue, the BraddockHotel rumour was a narrative that reflected popular outrage over whiteattacks on black manhood. The tragic and heroic figure of the youngsoldier reinforced notions of black masculinity and patriotism and helpedcrystallise racial resentments. A local black newspaper described him as ‘a symbol of all the injustices our boys in uniform suffer’, while NAACPsecretary Walter White maintained that Bandy’s identity as a soldier wasthe critical element in sparking the riot. ‘Had it been a Negro civilian,however prominent, who was shot,’ he speculated, ‘there would have beenno riot’. The power of the rumour, he argued, was based on ‘the fury bornof repeated unchecked, unpunished, and often unreported shooting, maim-ing, and insulting of Negro troops’. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr, agreed withthis analysis but broadened its implications even further: ‘When Bandy hit Collins over the head with that club, he was not mad with him only forarresting a colored woman, but he was mad with every white policemanthroughout the United States who had constantly beaten, wounded, andoften killed colored men and women without provocation’. Bandy’s ordeal,then, represented not just an attack on black manhood but an attack on theentire race by a callous white power structure.45

Rumours of Bandy’s death proved remarkably persistent, reflecting thecommunity’s readiness to believe the worst about police violence. As lateas the afternoon of 2 August, several hours after the riot and followingwidespread press reports that Bandy was alive and well, many youngHarlemites still insisted that the soldier had been killed. Pauli Murray, thena reporter for the New York Call, encountered such sentiments among boysgathered on a Harlem street corner:

‘That cop shot a soldier in the back, and we ain’t satisfied’. ‘But it was only a flesh wound’, I argued. ‘The man is alive and hasn’t beenhurt much’. ‘That ain’t true. That soldier was shot five times in the back. And he’s dead.That don’t come out in the papers, because they’re scared to let it be known.Mayor La Guardier [sic] is lying’.‘But how do you know that? What’s your proof? I tell you the NAACP hasmade an investigation, and the soldier is all right’.‘… Because my brother was right there when it happened. They killed thatsoldier, and they’ve killed a lot more people – but they ain’t letting that out yet’.46



As this exchange reveals, the power of the rumours remained quite strongamong young black males – the most likely victims of police violence –even in the face of concrete evidence to the contrary. Such young menwere, according to eyewitness reports, the dominant participants in the riot(although women were well represented among the looters).

The Harlem uprising of 1943 was one of the first of many ghetto com-modity riots that shook US cities in the late twentieth century. In these dis-turbances, violence was directed mainly against white-owned businesses,police, and other symbols of white power and was generally confined toinner-city black neighbourhoods. This new form of rioting reflected theincreasing isolation of the post-war ghetto as well as the changing dy-namics of American racism, a racism that had become more subtle, imper-sonal, and bureaucratic. Moreover, the rioters’ hostility toward police andother municipal authorities suggested that the state itself was now directlyimplicated in the problem of racism. The male-dominated ghetto riot alsoreflected a new concern with black male powerlessness in the post-warera. As unemployment among young African-American men rose steadilyin the 1950s and 1960s, the ability of working-class black men to supporttheir families and fulfil the expectations raised by post-war consumerculture was severely limited. In the 1960s, young ghetto males struck backagainst the symbols of white power that had, in their view, robbed theirfamilies and denied their manhood. Not surprisingly, women were releg-ated to the role of looters (i.e. consumers) in these riots and generallyceased being active combatants as they had been in earlier southern-styleand communal riots.

In retrospect, World War II was a transitional phase in the evolution of urban race rioting. The changes unleashed by the war – renewed blackurban migration, expanded industrial employment, growing political power,and the rise of a strong civil rights movement – reduced incidents of lynch-ing and made the southern-style riot virtually obsolete. These same trendscontributed to a growing black assertiveness that manifested itself in theHarlem riot of 1943 and the ghetto uprisings that swept American cities inthe 1960s. Although there were scattered signs of collective black assert-iveness prior to the war (the Harlem riot of 1935) and southern-style whitepogroms afterward (the Athens, Alabama, riot of 1946), the strife-filled yearof 1943 stands as a transitional moment between the communal and white-led riots of the early twentieth century and the black-led ghetto revolts ofthe latter half of the century.

Not surprisingly, the precipitating incidents and rumours which sparkedthese riots changed accordingly, from narratives of interracial rape andatrocities against women to accounts of white police violence against blackmen. While rape rumours served as sparks for race riots at various pointsin the early twentieth century, the rape narrative seems to have disappearedas a riot precipitant in the post-World War II era. In her tabulations of riotrumours, Knopf found that white rumours of black sexual assault that had



preceded so many riots in the 1917–43 period were completely absentduring the black ghetto disturbances of the 1960s. Following the pattern of the Harlem riot of 1943, incidents of police brutality against black males emerged as the single most important rumour theme in these laterriots, accounting for 61 per cent of all rumours connected to precipitatingincidents.47

In many cases, however, elements of the traditional mother/child atrocitystory re-emerged in these rumours, fusing with the newer theme of policebrutality. In two of the decade’s most devastating riots, Watts in 1965 andDetroit in 1967, alleged atrocities against pregnant black women combinedwith incidents of police violence to spark the initial outbreaks of rioting. InLos Angeles, the disorder began following a police arrest and beating of ayoung black man for drunk driving. The outbreak of collective violence,however, occurred only after a police officer collared a young woman whomhe believed had spit on him. The rough handling of the woman, dressed ina loose-fitting barber smock, prompted crowd cries of ‘Look what they’redoing to that pregnant girl’. As besieged police fled under a barrage ofrocks, bricks, and bottles, the Watts riot began.48

In Detroit’s 1967 riot, the precipitating incident was a police raid on a‘blind pig’, an after-hours social club where several black servicemen werecelebrating their return from Vietnam. Police arrested eighty-two patrons asa crowd of some 200 onlookers gathered. The actual violence broke outwhen rumours circulated that police were abusing young black arrestees,many of whom were women. The crowd’s violent response to these rumours,riot investigators believed, was influenced by another incident in the sameneighbourhood a few weeks earlier. At that time, Danny Thomas, a twenty-seven-year-old black Vietnam veteran, was killed by a gang of white youthswhile walking with his pregnant wife in Rouge Park. The black-ownedMichigan Chronicle provided a highly emotional account of the killing,noting that the ‘young woman who saw her husband killed by a gang …lost her baby’. Widely read and discussed in Detroit’s black community, theChronicle story highlighted traditional themes of white aggression againstthe black family. This narrative, combined with accounts of the policeassault on black veterans – paragons of black manhood and patriotism –ignited Detroit’s second major race riot in less than twenty-five years.49

In nearly all riot-precipitating rumours of this period, white aggressiontoward the bodies of symbolically significant black individuals – women,children, veterans, ministers, etc. – played a central role in the narrative.50

Clearly, rumours were more than just informal communications; they expres-sed traditional fears, resentments, and animosities around which collectiveaction could take place. But why have gendered rumours figured so prom-inently in the outbreak of race riots, both in the black-led uprisings of the1960s and in the communal and southern-style riots of the early twentiethcentury? The answer lies in the mutually constitutive relationship of raceand gender. As Gail Bederman has demonstrated, white Americans have



long conflated male dominance and racial supremacy and have played onanxieties about gender to influence racial ideologies and practices.51 In thecase of southern-style race riots, whites constructed rape rumours that in-corporated anxieties about women’s roles into narratives of racial trans-gression that compelled individuals to move toward collective violence.The linking of racial and gender ideologies was equally important in therumours that sparked the black-led ghetto riots of the late twentiethcentury. As African-Americans became a growing force in northern citiesduring and after World War II, black men asserted their right to protect‘their’ women and to reclaim the mantle of black manhood. With the riseof black power in the 1960s, the effort to valorise black manhood reachednew heights. The ghetto revolts, sparked by narratives of white assaults onblack manhood, were expressions of this effort. Whether in the 1960s orthe 1940s, then, notions of race were inextricably bound up with those ofgender.

Historians who ignore the role of rumour and gender ideology in crystal-lising racial unrest miss an important tool for understanding group vio-lence. It is not enough to explore the structural sources of white resentmentand black frustration that provoke race riots; we must also pay attention tothe language in which those resentments and frustrations were expressed.52

Notions of gender and family were central to the rumour vocabulary andto the concept of race itself; they helped forge a defensive group identityand helped crystallise frustrations and resentments into actual violence. Byprobing the ideas, images, and collective memory of racial communities,we can see how these ideological forces, together with social, political, andeconomic structures, worked dialectically to produce collective violencein our society.

Notes

The author would like to thank Julie Reuben, Claire Potter, Glennys Young, and Dan Zedekfor their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. In addition, the reviewers andeditors at Gender and History provided insightful critiques and useful comments thatimmeasurably improved the final manuscript.

1. Joel Williamson, ‘Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, andthe American Historian’, Journal of American History, 83 (1997), pp. 1221–53; RobinD. G. Kelley, ‘Referees’ Reports’, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘A Later Comment’, Journalof American History, 83 (1997), pp. 1258–61, 1268–70. In an unusual departure, theJAH published both Williamson’s article and six readers’ reports that offered starklydifferent assessments of the piece. Tellingly, the four white male readers favouredpublishing the piece, while two black male scholars (as well as Hall in her concludingcomment) expressed serious reservations.

2. Delineations of riot types can be found in Allan Grimshaw, ‘Lawlessness andViolence in America and Their Special Manifestation in Changing Negro–White Relation-ships’, in Racial Violence in the United States (Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago,1969),



pp. 14–28; and in Morris Janowitz, ‘Patterns of Collective Racial Violence’, in TheHistory of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. HughDavis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (Praeger, New York, 1969), pp. 412–43. Grimshaw’sterm ‘southern-style riot’ is not strictly accurate, as anti-black attacks by white groupswere once common throughout the country. In the twentieth century, as such riotsbecame increasingly rare in the North, they continued to occur with some frequency inthe South.

3. Allen D. Grimshaw, Racial Violence in the United States; Elliott Rudwick, RaceRiot in East St Louis, July 2, 1917 (Atheneum, New York, 1972; Southern IllinoisUniversity Press, 1964); William M. Tuttle, Jr, Race Riot (Atheneum, New York,1970);Dominic J. Capeci, Jr, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Temple University Press, Phila-delphia,1977). For an interesting critique of the structural strain approach, see CherylGreenberg, ‘The Politics of Disorder: Reexamining Harlem’s Riots of 1935 and 1943’,Journal of Urban History, 18 (1992), pp. 395–441.

4. George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press,Oxford, 1959); The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France andEngland, 1730–1848 (Wiley, New York, 1964); and Paris and London in the EighteenthCentury: Studies in Popular Protest (Viking Press, New York, 1971); E. P. Thompson,‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present,50 (1971), pp. 76–136; Roberta Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield,Illinois, 1908 (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1990); Dominic J. Capeci and MarthaWilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (University Press of Missis-sippi, Jackson, 1991).

5. Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot, p. 103; Capeci and Wilkerson,Layered Violence, p. 169; Robert M. Fogelson and Robert B. Hill, ‘Who Riots? A Studyof Participation in the 1967 Riots’, in Supplementary Studies, ed. National AdvisoryCommission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC, 1968), pp. 233–4 and appendix,table 2.

6. Robert M. Fogelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Double-day, Garden City, NY, 1971), p. 81; Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City (Universityof Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1989), pp. 249–50; Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943, p. 126; Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot, p. 103; Capeci and Wilkerson,Layered Violence, pp. 69, 73.

7. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, pp. 69, 73, 171; Fogelson, Violence asProtest, p. 81.

8. Rudwick, Race Riot in East St Louis, pp. 45, 48; Tuttle, Race Riot, p. 12; ScottEllsworth, Death in the Promised Land: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 (Louisiana StateUniversity Press, Baton Rouge, 1982), p. 59; Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence,pp. 90, 93; Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot, p. 130; Charles Crowe, ‘Racial Massacre in Atlanta, September 22, 1906’, Journal of Negro History, 54 (1969),p. 165.

9. For women as defenders, see Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, p. 113;William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of1900 (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1976), p. 151; and Senechal, TheSociogenesis of a Race Riot, p. 147. For women as combatants, see Senechal, TheSociogenesis of a Race Riot, pp. 30, 173; Rudwick, Race Riot in East St Louis, p. 45;Crowe, ‘Racial Massacre in Atlanta’, p. 165; and Bruce Nelson, ‘Organized Labor andthe Struggle for Black Equality During World War II’, Journal of American History, 80(1993), p. 980.



10. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘“The Mind That Burns in Each Body”: Women, Rape andRacial Violence’, in The Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow,Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1983), pp. 328–49.

11. Terry Ann Knopf, Rumors, Race and Riots (Transaction Books, New Brunswick,NJ, 1975), pp. 108–164; Barbara J. Fields, in Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essaysin Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson(Oxford, New York, 1982), pp. 143–77. Historians have generally ignored the signific-ance of rumour in analysing riots. A notable exception is Arlette Farge and JacquesRevel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics Before the French Revolu-tion, trans. Claudia Mieville (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991).

12. Patricia Turner, I Heard It Through the Grape Vine: Rumor in African-AmericanCulture (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993); Fields, ‘Ideology and Race inAmerican History’, p. 149.

13. The only existing historical treatment of the Beaumont riot is James Albert BurranIII, ‘Racial Violence in the South During World War II’ (PhD diss., University ofTennessee, 1977).

14. Burran, ‘Racial Violence in the South’, pp. 165–7; Charles S. Johnson, To StemThis Tide (Pilgrim Press, Berkeley, 1943), p. 35; Merl E. Reed, ‘The FEPC, the BlackWorker, and the Southern Shipyards’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 74 (1975), pp. 462–4;Houston Informer, 3 July 1943.

15. Letter by T. H. Mitchell to Carter Wesley, in ‘Racial Tension – Beaumont, Texas,1943’ folder, Box A505, Group II, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress; Burran, ‘RacialViolence in the South’, pp. 169–71; Houston Informer, 3 July 1943; Houston Post, 18June 1943; Houston Chronicle, 18 June 1943. For an in-depth examination of wartimeracial tensions on urban transit lines in another southern city, see Robin D. G. Kelley,Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, New York,1994), pp. 55–75.

16. Beaumont Enterprise, 6, 7 June 1943; Beaumont Journal, 7 June 1943; Burran,‘Racial Violence in the South’, pp. 169–71.

17. Letter from unknown police captain to H. C. Galloway, 25 September 1943, in‘Racial Tension – Beaumont, Texas, 1943’ folder, Box A505, Group II, NAACP Papers;PM, 21 June 1943.

18. Beaumont Enterprise, 16 June 1943; Beaumont Journal, 16 June 1943; Burran,‘Racial Violence in the South’, pp. 171–4.

19. Beaumont Enterprise, 17, 19 June 1943; New York Times, 17 June 1943; Burran,‘Racial Violence in the South’, pp. 175–7, 180.

20. Beaumont Enterprise, 16, 17, 18, 19 June 1943; PM, 21 June 1943; Mitchell toWesley, NAACP Papers; unknown police captain to H. C. Galloway, NAACP Papers.

21. Knopf, Rumors, Race and Riots , pp. 62–5. On the specifics of interracial rape asa precipitating incident, see: Crowe, ‘Racial Massacre in Atlanta’, pp. 52–5, and JoelWilliamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford University Press, New York, 1984), pp. 209–216, on Atlanta; Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot, pp. 18–28, on Springfield;Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (Doubleday andCompany, Garden City, NY, 1966), pp. 21–33, on Washington and pp. 110–19, on Omaha;Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land, pp. 45–53, on Tulsa; and Bruce Nelson, ‘Organ-ized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality During World War II’, Journal ofAmerican History, 80 (1993), pp. 978–81, on Mobile. Two other racial disturbances, theWilmington, North Carolina, riot of 1898 and the Longview, Texas, riot of 1919, were



indirectly precipitated by alleged rapes. In these cases, black journalists’ efforts to revealalleged rape cases as consensual relationships between black men and white womensparked white reprisals against the black community as a whole. Williamson, TheCrucible of Race , pp. 195–201; Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, pp. 16-18.

22. Hall, ‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’, pp. 328-49, quote on p. 334; GeorgeFredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (Harper and Row, New York, 1971),pp. 276–7; Williamson, The Crucible of Race , p. 197; Martha Hodes, ‘The Sexual-ization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after theCivil War’, in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race Since the Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993), pp. 59–74. For a discussion of southern white women’s complicity in the developmentof the rape-lynching narrative, see LeeAnn Whites, ‘Rebecca Latimer Felton and theWife’s Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform’, Georgia HistoricalQuarterly, 76 (1992), pp. 368–72.

23. Hall, ‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’, pp. 332, 335–7. The denial of con-sensual relations between black men and white women did not always apply in casesinvolving lower-class whites. As Martha Hodes points out, the Klan and other whitesupremacist groups also terrorised poor white women who had sexual liaisons withblack men. Hodes, ‘The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics’, pp. 65–9.

24. Houston Informer, 26 June 1943; Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1947), pp. 70–71.Archibald worked at the Moore Drydock shipyards in Oakland, California, but herobservations are equally relevant to Beaumont, Mobile, and other southern shipyardcentres. See Nelson, ‘Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality’, pp. 966,980–81. Although there are no studies of crowd composition in Beaumont, it is unlikelythat rural migrants were the sole instigators of the riot, as many white Beaumontersclaimed. According to the local black newspaper, black riot victims ‘recognized manyof the men … and they know them to be citizens of Beaumont of longstanding’.

25. Such rumours were not unique to Beaumont. Researchers documented similarrumours of black men attacking unprotected white women in defence centres aroundthe country. See Howard Odum, Race and Rumors of Race (University of NorthCarolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1943), pp. 56–66; David J. Jacobsen, Affairs of DameRumor (Rinehart and Co., New York, 1948), p. 78.

26. My interpretation of this incident was influenced by Nancy MacLean’s analysisof the Leo Frank lynching case in Atlanta in 1913. Nancy MacLean, ‘The Leo Frank CaseReconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Politics’,Journal of American History, 78 (1991), pp. 917–48.

27. Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot, pp. 37, 44, 136, 139, 171.28. Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot, pp. 30, 173.29. Nelson, ‘Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality’, p. 980.30. The best comprehensive sources on the 1943 Detroit riot are: Capeci and

Wilkerson, Layered Violence; and Alfred McClung Lee and Norman DaymondHumphrey, Race Riot (Dryden Press, New York, 1943).

31. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, pp. 181–93.32. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, pp. 5–6.33. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grape Vine, p. 31; Thurgood Marshall, ‘Report

Concerning Activities of the Detroit Police During the Riots, June 21 and 22, 1943’, p. 4, in ‘Racial Tension, Detroit, MI Riot, 1943’ file, Box A505, Part II, NAACP Papers;Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, p. 21.



34. Marshall, ‘Report Concerning Activities of the Detroit Police’, p. 4; Capeci andWilkerson, Layered Violence, p. 7.

35. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of RaceRelations and a Race Riot (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1922), pp. 30–31.

36. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, pp. 72–3.37. The downplaying of the interracial rape theme in African-American rumour is

something of an enigma given black women’s historical experience of rape and sexualharassment under both slavery and domestic service. Darlene Clark Hine has suggestedthat black women, in their quest for personal autonomy and economic liberation,developed a ‘culture of dissemblance’ to protect the sanctity of their inner lives. If blackwomen practised a politics of silence and secrecy, as Hine suggests, the black discourseon interracial rape might well have been muted. Hine, ‘Rape and the Inner Lives ofSouthern Black Women’, in Southern Women: Histories and Identities, ed. VirginiaBernhard et al. (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1992), pp. 177–89.

38. Deborah G. White, ‘Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the AntebellumPlantation South’, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983), pp. 248–59. On the patriarchalnature of slave families, see: Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom(Pantheon, New York, 1976); Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made(Vintage, New York, 1974).

39. W. E. B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (Harcourt, Brace andHowe, New York, 1920), p. 172; Ronald T. Takaki, ‘Violence in Fantasy: The Fiction of William Wells Brown’, in Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1972), pp. 221–6.

40. Walter White, Rope and Faggot (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1929), pp. 28–9.41. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African-American Migrant

Women and the East Bay Community (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,1996), p. 6; Odum, Race and Rumors of Race, pp. 73–80.

42. Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943, pp. 100–108; Walter White, ‘Behind theHarlem Riot’, New Republic, 16 August 1943, p. 221.

43. Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943, pp. 100–108; Walter White, ‘Behind the Harlem Riot’, New Republic, 16 August 1943, p. 221; New York Times, 3 August1943; People’s Voice, 7 August 1943; Harold Orlansky, The Harlem Riot: A Study in Mass Frustration, Social Analysis Report No. 1 (Social Analysis, New York, 1943),pp. 1–5.

44. Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943, p. 143; New York Times, 25 June 1943; People’sVoice, 3 July 1943. Police brutality against blacks has a long history in New York, butthe problem became especially visible during the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, an allegedincident of police brutality sparked the Harlem riot of 1935, which historians identifyas the first major ghetto commodity riot.

45. People’s Voice, 7 August 1943; ‘Statement by Walter White re Harlem Riot,August 1, 1943’, and ‘Harlem Riot Showed Resentment to Soldier Treatment, August 6,1943’, in ‘Racial Tension, Harlem 1943’ file, Box A506, Group II, NAACP Papers; AdamClayton Powell, Sr, Riots and Ruins (Richard R. Smith, New York, 1945), p. 47; Turner,I Heard It Through the Grape Vine, p. 44. The maltreatment of black soldiers in theSouth was particularly fresh in the minds of black New Yorkers because of recent newsreports of a race riot at Camp Stewart, Georgia. Interestingly, a white militarypoliceman’s assault on the visiting wife of a Harlem soldier sparked the conflagration,in which the MP was killed and four other soldiers injured.

46. Murray, quoted in Orlansky, The Harlem Riot, p. 23.



47. Knopf, Rumors, Race, and Riots, pp. 207, 227, 235–8. Although rape rumoursand southern-style riots have disappeared, the image of the black rapist continues topermeate white culture and has persisted as a subtle undercurrent of racial violence inthe post-World War II era. During the 1960s, when most rioting was confined to urbanblack neighbourhoods, there were widespread rumours of black rioters invading whitesuburban neighborhoods. Outside Detroit, communities such as Dearborn and Livoniaoffered firearms training that proved quite popular with white housewives. As onehysterical woman explained: ‘I’ve got a teenage daughter, and you know what theywant. You know why I’m learning to shoot this gun. Let me tell you, I’m going to use it’.Marilyn Rosenthal, ‘Where Rumor Raged’, Transaction, 8(1971), p. 41.

48. California, Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in theCity – An End or a Beginning? (Sacramento, 1965), pp. 10–12; David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston,1973), pp. 4–5; Robert Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (Bantam Books, NewYork, 1967), pp. 19–22.

49. United States, National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Com-mission), Report (Bantam Books, New York, 1968), pp. 205–7; Fine, Violence in theModel City, pp. 148–50, 160–61. The presence of gendered rumours was not unique tothe Los Angeles and Detroit riots. White attacks on black womanhood figured prom-inently in other riot-provoking rumours of the 1960s, including those that sparked the1964 disturbances in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Jersey City.

50. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grape Vine, pp. 55–6.51. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender

and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago,1995), pp. 4, 45, 74.

52. In some cases, struggles over race and gender were the key factor behind racialviolence, overshadowing the structural factors on which historians have concentrated.In 1910, for example, the heated discussions of race and manhood surrounding blackheavyweight Jack Johnson’s upset over his white contender, Jim Jeffries, led to a seriesof race riots around the country. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, pp. 1–10.

