At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, I presented the harrowing story of Judge Edward Aaron. In 1957, Aaron was tortured and castrated at the hands of several members of the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy in an attempt to send a threatening message to black Civil Rights activists. At the conclusion of the panel, a male audience member asked, “Was he [Judge Aaron] raped?” I was stunned by this question; to me, it seemed obvious that Aaron had been sexually violated, at the very least, and my answer relayed my sense of the events as a sexual crime. It was clear, however, that this man, like many others, read the violation of Aaron, and many other black men, as being some other class of crime. In the absence of penetrative sex, he could not frame Aaron's assault as a sexual crime. In part, this is because in the absence of penetration, we do not generally read the male body as vulnerable and open to sexual abuse in the same way as the female body. For obvious reasons, lynching is bound up with sex. The narrative of the “black male rapist” is quite pervasive. Nevertheless, we tend to default to an almost exclusively racial lens when viewing lynching. This essay does not aim to displace this idea but to make a critical intervention in the conversation by suggesting that lynching can be understood as a type of racialized, sexual violence that uniquely harms black men.
Using the case of Judge Aaron, I want to situate the practice of lynching, particularly castration, as a type of gender violence. By doing so, I seek to parse the tension that exists between thinking of sexuality not solely as the impetus for lynching as being central to the lynching practice itself. In short, this essay is invested in exploring how we think about gender violence, how we map certain crimes on certain bodies, and, finally, what political work this does. In focusing on the cases of black men, I do not mean to downplay the experiences of women who faced similar fates. Rather, I want us to begin to think of black male bodies as also susceptible to experiences of racialized, sexual violence.Footnote 1
Using the case of Judge Aaron, I seek to demonstrate the connections between lynching and sexual violence. The fact that Aaron was not sexually penetrated is unimportant as it does not fundamentally alter our legal, social, or practical understanding of sexual assault.Footnote 2 Employing a twenty-first-century lens, I seek to rearticulate understanding of the meaning of sexual assault with respect to black male victims of lynching. The Aaron case is representative of a peculiar focus on the genitalia of black men. Aaron, like many others, had his body violated without his consent. To this end, this essay is organized as follows: a brief discussion of the Aaron case, the nature of lynching and its parallels to sexualized aggression, and an exploration of the way we can understand lynching as sexual violence.
Bearing Witness: The Case of Judge Aaron
On September 2, 1957, Joe Pritchett, Bart Floyd, John Griffin, Bill Miller, Grover McCullough, and Jessie Mabry, members of the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, went in search of a black person to frighten. This was an effort on their part to stem the tide of black activism in and around Birmingham, Alabama. While on their journey, they made the fateful decision to purchase razor blades and turpentine. At random, they chose an unsuspecting 34-year-old house painter named Aaron walking along the road with his female companion, Cora Parker.Footnote 3
Under the cover of night, they forced Aaron into one of the vehicles and blindfolded him. Mabry drove to a home on the outskirts of town used as the group's headquarters. They forced Aaron to crawl like a dog into the house. Once in the house, Aaron was beaten and questioned about his connection to Civil Rights leaders, such as Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he did not know. In fact, according to Aaron, he was not affiliated with the Civil Rights movement in any fashion—a fact later corroborated by white community members who viewed Aaron as a “good negro,” because he was not an agitator for Civil Rights. At some point during the interrogation, Aaron was asked by Pritchett if he preferred his “life or his nuts [sic]” (Mabry v. State 1959). Aaron responded that he wanted neither option. Unfortunately, Pritchett chose for him (Huie Reference Huie2000).
According to Aaron, he was made to remove his clothes, at which point a struggle ensued. Overpowered, he was struck in the head numerous times and knocked to the ground. He was laid on his back while “two men stood on his arms, pinning them to the ice-cold floor. Two others stood on his legs” (Britton Reference Britton1963, 24). The decision was made and Floyd proceeded in “excising the entire scrotum and contents in the process” (Mabry v. State 1959). They then proceeded to throw turpentine on Aaron's wounds, ostensibly to inflict further pain, but which may have inadvertently extended his life (Eskew Reference Eskew1997). The gang redressed Aaron and then left him to die on the road. After several reports of a “bloody Negro” on the road, Birmingham police officers discovered Aaron and later testified that Aaron looked as though he had been “dipped in blood from the belt down” (Huie Reference Huie2000, 16). The officers delivered him to the Veterans Administration Hospital. After three weeks and much uncertainty, Aaron survived his injuries. Yet he would suffer from years of mental and physical anguish (Britton Reference Britton1963; Mitchell Reference Mitchell1958).
Aaron's case is not unique; this type of violence was fairly usual during this time period (Dray Reference Dray2003; Hartman Reference Hartman1997; Hodes Reference Hodes1997; Wiegman Reference Wiegman1995). What is unusual, however, is that Aaron's tormentors were convicted of this crime. The conviction of these men was due to the fact that Aaron's cause was championed by local law enforcement. Likewise, Aaron lived to relay the details of his torment that evening. Not unlike other trials involving rape victims, Aaron was forced to show his wounds to the all-male, white jury. Such a high standard of “evidence” was not uncommon in cases of sexual assault (McGuire Reference McGuire2010; Sommerville Reference Sommerville2004).
The evidentiary standard of his trial was not unlike those of women who brought charges of rape and other sexual assaults (McGuire Reference McGuire2010; Sommerville Reference Sommerville2004). Aaron was required to come to trial and testify about that evening's events. His credibility in bringing these charges was, in part, shored up by the whites who were interested in and pursued the legal case on his behalf. Still, Aaron had to “walk to the jury box and drop his pants so the white men could see his injury” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1958, 21). The jurors needed visual confirmation that some trauma had occurred. In this way, Aaron was not treated appreciably different at trial than women who had experienced some sort of sexual assault (Sommerville Reference Sommerville2004).
“Doing” White Supremacy: The Nature of Lynching Practice
Taken under cover of night, Aaron was humiliated and coerced into being sexually molested and maimed. In her work White Women, Black Men, Hodes (Reference Hodes1997) brings to bear a wealth of testimony provided by black men, and their white partners, of experiences of sexual violation aimed at reinforcing white supremacy. In these cases, sexual mutilation was part of a repertoire of violent practices (Messerschimdt 1998). In testimony of their experiences, many men said they had suffered some sort of injury to their genitals. While it is easy to read these overt acts as sexual crimes, we have read the preoccupation with black male genitalia primarily through the lens of race.
In many cases, the official justifications for lynching were about restoring a racial order that had been violated by those who were lynched. From this vantage point, it is clear why lynching would be seen primarily as a crime of racial violence. Regardless of the crime, those black people who dared to venture outside of the racial roles ascribed by society faced a high likelihood of death (Hodes Reference Hodes1997). While the “etiquette of lynching” required an actual infraction against the prevailing racial order, it was clear that lynching itself became far more fixated on the eradication of black masculinity (Brundage Reference Brundage1993; Harris Reference Harris1995; Wiegman Reference Wiegman1995). In many cases, this came through an increasing reliance on castration and other forms of sexual mutilation.
The details of the Aaron case, and many others noted in congressional testimony from a generation prior, make it obviously one of sexual assault. The vulnerability of black men to sexual assault has often eluded conversations of lynching (Hodes Reference Hodes1997; Wiegman Reference Wiegman1995). This, in large measure, is because of the gender of the victims and their assailants. Because lynching is generally carried out by men against other men, we do not (want to) see the overtly sexual elements of these crimes because the bodies in these circumstances are masculinized (Brundage Reference Brundage1993; Dray Reference Dray2003; Markovitz Reference Markovitz2004).Footnote 4 Both white and black men have been invested in a certain patriarchal narrative of history (Estes Reference Estes2005; Gaines Reference Gaines1996; Horton Reference Horton1986).Footnote 5
White men, for obvious reasons, were interested in developing a narrative of their strength that served to justify these acts. On the other hand, black men were routinely denied demonstration of their masculine authority, such as the protection of black women, the ability to carry a firearm or defend themselves against social, political, and economic incursions, and the like. Therefore, black people became invested in a particular narrative of their own strength, which was symbolized by the physical strength of black men. Thus, speaking of the overtly sexual nature of lynching was impolitic, but it also did not fit the image of empowerment that the black community sought to portray. Consequently, black outrage over these crimes is expressed in decidedly racial language. Nonetheless, the act of lynching, particularly castration, is a demonstration of male-on-male sexual abuse.
The lynchings of black women were not as widely sanctioned by the white community because of their gender, which painted them as less threatening. Therefore, we see a tension in terms of the portrayal of black women. Their race made them dangerous to white people, yet their gender placed them in a weaker position relative to white men. Because of the legacy of black women's sexual violation at the hands of white men, there is a way in which we understand the lynching of black women as already sexualized. There is no rape myth that can be deployed in these cases, and so the sexual aspects of these cases derive from their gendered position. The sexual exploitation of black women in the postemancipation period is well documented (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Feimster Reference Feimster2009; McGuire Reference McGuire2010; Simien Reference Simien2011). It is not surprising that most lynchings of black women entailed some form of sexual violence (Feimster Reference Feimster2009; Simien Reference Simien2011). The vulnerability represented by lynched black women allows us to see more clearly the racialized and sexualized dynamics of these lynchings in ways that we do not where black men are concerned. I contend that given the inability of black men, as well as black women, to maintain their bodily sanctity, we can and should understand black men as also suffering from racialized, sexual transgressions. In this manner, the sexualized elements of lynching are not limited to female victims.
Concluding Thoughts
By participating in this project, I endeavored to find a way to insinuate the lives of black men into conversations about gender violence. This is important because, in a number of ways, we are invested in notions of black male strength that belie the many vulnerabilities experienced by black men and the larger black community through time. Most basic has been a lack of bodily safety. In the case of Judge Aaron and other black men who shared a similar fate—who were clearly at the margins of white masculine power, in possession of none of the markers of white, male, gender norms, living in a world that was inherently dangerous to black lives, and thoroughly dehumanized—it becomes apparent how lynching as the apparatus of white male power is both racialized and highly sexualized.
Thus, it has been my hope to disentangle the racialized, sexual violence experienced by Judge Aaron outside of and apart from lynching as a response to black male sexuality. I hope to begin a conversation that broadens our conceptions of gender violence and racial violence that includes black men. While we routinely think of homicide as being outside of the realm of gender violence, this particular crime is disproportionately experienced by young black men and women between the ages of 15 and 24. Likewise, black women and black men are disproportionately likely to experience intimate-partner violence (Rennison and Welchans Reference Rennison and Welchans.2000). These references are not to suggest that experiences of black men and women are the same. Rather, these figures demonstrate the ways in which race confounds gender difference. This is not to say that gender difference does not exist. Indeed, it does. What this work suggests is a need to disrupt and open up multiple discourses around gender difference that seem comfortable with a focus almost exclusively on the identities and experiences of women.
Despite the unfortunate circumstances of lynching, I think that there is much to mine in this tragic past that allows us to see the ways in which black men also encounter gender violence. Lynching as a set of practices aimed at maintaining white, male privilege demonstrates what can happen when we lose sight of the humanity of those who are not like us. Thinking of “men” as a unified category overlooks the many ways in which race structures gender difference. Lynching as a form of racialized, sexual violence underscores these differences and provides a window into our thinking about the intersectionality of black male lives.
