Abstract

The article interrogates the logic deployed by southern white supremacists seeking to excuse their racist hatred and violence during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. White supremacists in the South pointedly wielded the shibboleth of the “nigger beast rapist” preying upon white females to justify this hatred and violence, most powerfully manifested through lynching and the mere threat of lynching. The actual demographics of heterosexual sexual violence in North Carlina in particular during this period, as pieced together in the article with available evidence, contradicted white supremacist claims; in fact, as suggested in the article, heterosexual violence was as common within racial groupings as between them.