ENABLING AN ERA OF LYNCHING: RETREAT, RESISTANCE, AND REFUGE

Northern academics promoting the field of "scientific racism" concocted theories to legitimate the claim that Black men were dangerous subhumans predisposed to rape. By the late 1880s, numerous American scholars viewed African Americans as “a race that was devolving on the scale of civilization and becoming increasingly dangerous.”209 University of Pennsylvania professor Daniel G. Brinton, who later became president of the International Congress of Anthropology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, opined in 1890 that Black people had regressed to “midway between the Orang-utang and the European white.” Brown University sociologist Lester Ward likewise concluded in 1930 that the Black man was compelled by the “imperious voice of nature to rape white women and thus raise his race to a little higher level.”

Chapter 4
Equal Justice Initiative
Salute To Black History Month