Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (48 page)

He disappeared into a back room and re-emerged with two manilla folders. "Perhaps this is what you're looking for."

One folder was marked "Rape."
It
was a collection of news paper clippings dating back to the nineteen forties and culled from New York tabloids and the Daily Worker. The tabloid clips were garish features on black rapists and rape-murderers, complete with

pictures of wild-eyed men in handcuffs and high-school graduation photos of their white victims, articles clearly designed to exploit racial fears. In contrast, the Worker articles were short, pamphle teering accounts of Southern interracial rape trials, lynchings, near lynchings, and the work of defense and/or justice committees. The second folder was marked "Women."
It
contained a pile of invita tions and souvenir programs from some national Negro sororities. Why should I have found the male bias of the Schomburg Center any more distressing than the male bias of the
A. A.
Brill Collection at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute where I did my research on Freudian theories of rape? I don't know. But I

did.

According to the FBl's Uniform Crime Reports, 47 percent of all Americans arrested for rape in
1973
were black, as opposed to 58 percent of all those arrested for murder and 63 percent of those arrested for armed robbery. These statistics are interesting from several angles. For one thing, the black crime rate in this country appears to be wildly out of proportion to the
1970
census figures, which show a black population
of
11
percent, although blacks claim they are chronically undercounted in the census, and I would agree. But what is really interesting about these figures, once we stipulate that poverty and ghetto conditions are breeding grounds for violent crime, is that the black rapist lags behind other black criminals by eleven to sixteen percentage points. This may be due

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to underreporting and undercounting of black-on-black rape (see pages 366-67) .

The FBI holds to a firm policy of not reporting arrest figures

for interracial rape. This is unfortunate because these figures would be a valuable national statistic. Four other studies that I know of have been more revealing. The staff of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence did a
i
7-city survey based on 1967 police statistics and came up with a figure of
10
percent for black-on-white rape and a "negligible" percent ( .3) for white-on-black rape, which the staff report qualified with the state ment, "Because white males have long had nearly institutionalized access to Negro women with relatively little fear of being reported, it is likely that the true proportion of Negroes raped by whites is larger."*

A Memphis police department study by Brenda
A.
Brown of

reported rapes and attempted rapes, using 1973 statistics, dis covered that 16 percent of all rapes in Memphis were black on white, but only .56 percent were white on black.

Menachem Amir, studying the files of the Philadelphia police department for 1958 and 1960, found that in those years only 7 percent of the Philadelphia rapes were interracial. Breaking it down, Amir found tha t in 4 percent of the cases white men raped black women and in 3 percent of the cases black men raped white women.

Dr. Charles Hayman did a yearly analysis of rape victims admitted to D.C. General Hospital in Washington from 1965 to 1971, during a period of time in which 95 percent of all Washing ton's reported rape victims were taken to D.C. General for their medical examinations. Hayman found tha t in this city with a black population of 70 percent, black-on-black rape accounted for 76 percent of all his cases, white-on-white rape accounted for 3 per cent, white-on-black rape amounted to less than half of a percent-

* The staff report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence also discussed interracial Uniform
Crime Reports avoid. In the same
i
7-city survey it was estimated that 47 percent of all reported robberies were cases of "younger black males robbing older white males." Robbery, generally characterized by "have-nots" forcibly taking from those they perceive as "haves," contains the highest interracial component of any violent crime. Rape has the second-highest in terracial component.

age point, but black-on-white rape accounted for a significant
21

percent of all reported Washington rapes.

Hayman's Washington data and Brown's Memphis data were compiled more than a decade af ter Amir's Philadelphia study, and that decade, the sixties, was marked by an explosion of racial tension throughout the United States. As a matter of fact Hayman discovered that the percentage of black-on-white rapes rose each year. Amir did not publish his findings until
1971
and Hayman, a public health administrator for the city of Washington, felt com pelled to write, "In contrast to Amir's finding very few cases of white females raped by blacks, these constituted a significant pro portion of our series, especially when physical injury was sustained and in victims
2
5 years and older. Although we agree that reported rape is mostly a black-black phenomenon, the increasing number and proportion of black-white rapes indicates to us an increase in aggression and violence, in hostility to females, and to white females."

The difference between an incidence of 3 percent for black-on white rapes ( Philadelphia, c.
1960)
and
21
percent ( Washington,

c.
1970)
is startling.
It
is also unsettling, inflammatory and some how illiberal even to talk about. Why? For the answer we need to look at another series of statistics.

Professor Marvin Wolfgang of the University of Pennsyl vania's school of criminology and Professor Anthony Amsterdam of the university's law school did a comparison study of three thou sand rape convictions in eleven Southern states between
1945
and
1965.
Thirteen percent of all convicted blacks were executed. By comparing the rate of black executions to white executions, Wolf gang and Amsterdam found that blacks were seven times as likely as whites to receive this maximum penalty.
If,
however, a black was convicted of raping a white woman, he was 18 times as likely to be executed as a black who raped a black, a white who raped a white, or a white who raped a black woman. ( Wolfgang's extensive re search into comparative patterns of punishment made him con clude that blacks usually receive longer prison terms than whites for most-but not, as we shall see, all-criminal offenses.)

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show that of all men executed in these United States for rape since
1930
( the last execution for rape was in
1964;
the last execution for any crime was in
1967),
89 percent have been black. (The Justice Department

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does not reveal how many of these executions were for interracial rape.)

A study of rape convictions in the city of Baltimore conducted by
a
black bar association in 1967 also shows
a
pattern of discrimi

natory sentencing. Seventy-five percent of the 629 men brought to trial for rape in Baltimore between 1962 and 1966 were black. Black-on-black cases accounted for 449 of these trials. Conviction rates for black-on-black rape and white-on-white rape matched each other at 57 percent. Conviction rates for interracial rape were considerably higher: 78 percent for black-on-white rape and 83 percent for white-on-black rape, but in one-fif th as many trials.

Of the four categories of rapist and victim in a racial mix, blacks received the stiffest sentences for raping white women and
the mildest
sentences for raping
black
women. Of the 26 blacks convicted in Baltimore of raping white women, 13 received sen tences of from
20
years to life, three received a life sentence, and one was sentenced to death. Only one got less than five-to-ten years. Of the five white men convicted in Baltimore of raping black women, one received a sentence of from
15
to
20
years, three received less than five years, and one received a suspended sen tence.

Excluding the death penalty and the life sentence, punish ment for Baltimore rapists in each of the four categories looked like this: