White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

By Martha Hodes

Book Overview

"[A] fascinating survey of interracial relationships in the South between the 1680s and the 1880s. . . . Enthralling."--David Nicholson, Washington Post

This award-winning book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.

Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves--and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300077505
• ISBN13: 9780300077506
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Scandalously Good Book

This is a scandalously good and honest book; well researched and successful in pulling back the scab on one of the many important subterranean areas of southern America's lurid but very active cross-racial sexual life. Most of America's social history remains tucked away in various nooks and crannies of our collective repressed minds. While the evidence is everywhere (the large numbers of American mulattoes and the fact that half of all American blacks and Native Americans have some white blood and rather incredibly about 30% of all whites have some black blood: How did it get that way? -- not through the White woman-Black man route, for sure. There is a great deal to chew on here. Among others, it puts to rest the old myth of the wild black buck rapist. Many, if not most of the blacks lynched for rape were certifiably engaged in love affairs discovered and exposed too soon, with predictable consequences: The black man usually ended up paying the ultimate price to protect the reputation of his white female lover. But in many such instances the woman refused to take the "he raped me defense" and openly declared her love for her illicit black mate, and as a result, also suffered the inevitable consequences -effective expulsion from the white race. When the other half of this sordid story comes to the fore - the "goings-on in the dark" between white men and black women -- only then can we truly say that America is coming of age. Five stars

ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST TABOOS

THis Book is Very Well DOcumented & Done.Unlike THe Media at large Today or on a Bigger Scale Hollywood who still is stuck in The GUess Whose Coming To DInner Phase Of Life? Martha Hodges Brings Too Life The Fact that WHite WOmen & Black Men have Gotten Together during Slavery & After The Civil War.Books Like this are Very Important Because if You Go By TV it's Usually Watered Down or Down in Token Form.ALot OF Respect TOO Martha Hodges FOr Bringing This Book To Light.

An excellent book

This is the best book I have read on this subject. I highly recommend it