On July 12, 1898 John Henry James’ body, riddled with bullets, hanged from a locust tree. The Virginia man had been in the custody of the Albemarle County sheriff, awaiting grand jury action on a rape allegation, when a mob of 150 people kidnapped and killed him.

James, the story went, sexually assaulted one Julia Hotopp. (I belabor here, in confirming your suspicion that James was Black and Hotopp white.) There were doubts surrounding Hotopp’s allegation. Still, a newspaper applauded the mob, noting that “the people of Charlottesville heartily approve the lynching.”  The grand jury, determined to have its say too, over a corpse no less, issued a posthumous indictment.

For more than a century, James was an accused rapist. He obtained a minuscule measure of justice on July 12, 2023—the 125th anniversary of his death—when Albemarle County prosecutor James Hingeley asked a circuit court to revisit the indictment, and judge Cheryl V. Higgins, at long last, dismissed it.

These officials are to be commended; criminal indictments do their best work in the universe of the living. James’ is an easy and instructive case, illustrating with blinding clarity the umbilical link between illegal lynching and state-sanctioned rape executions, two corporeal atrocities that were, infamously, pretty much reserved for Black males—boys, as well as men.

James’ exoneration is also a prophetic case. It demarcates a path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females, mostly in latter-day Confederate states, at the hands of a supremacist legal regime.

That John Henry James’ indictment came after his lynching may seem absurd—but in 1898, and for decades thereafter, such was the symbiotic common ground between the county courthouse and the lynching locale. Legal officials raced against the mob to confer upon these killings the stamp of validity, and lynching parties, enacting “lynch law,” adorned their proceedings with the rituals of the courtroom. Lynchings were extensions and expressions of the administration of justice, not estranged from it. A case in point: in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1917, a group of men known as the Shelby Avengers announced their intention to lynch a man charged with the sexual assault and murder of a white teenager, giving people ample time to reach the location where, they promised, justice would be dispensed. After the man was burned, decapitated, and dismembered, the Commercial Appeal reported, “throughout the entire proceedings there was perfect order …  and none offered violence not countenanced by the summary court.”  The newspaper also complimented the Avengers for having the forethought to appoint a treasurer to secure compensation for those participants who had absented themselves from work to search for and lynch the man. Jury duty.

This pattern persisted from the end of the Civil War until the early 20th century. Beginning around 1909, with the introduction of the electric chair, the numbers of legal executions rose, slowly replacing extralegal lynchings, at least in Virginia.  Some scholars of lynching—Fitzhugh Brundage, for example—have expressed skepticism that a rise in legal execution in the early 20th century correlated with a decline in extralegal lynching. But the historical record is replete with evidence that executions were understood to be a replacement for the mob, particularly in Virginia.

From 1880 to 1909, 27 Black men were lynched in Virginia for rape or attempted rape, while just seven were lynched in the four decades that followed. From 1908 to 1965, Virginia executed 56 men on non-lethal sexual assault charges. All of them were Black. These numbers are not anomalous: 19th-century versions of the state’s rape laws explicitly split white rape from Black rape. Before the Civil War, only “free negroes” charged with assault against white females were subject to the death penalty; the penalty for white males was limited to a 10- to 20-year prison term.  Over its entire 400-year history, the state killed just three white men for rape, all before 1868, and no white man was ever put to death for attempted rape while 36 Black men suffered that fate—one as late as 1940.

In 1921, the state’s highest court made the connection between the rise in executions and the decline in lynching explicit. In Hart v. Commonwealth, a case sanctioning the execution of a 21-year-old for attempted rape and rejecting his argument that the sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment, the Virginia court opined that “the likelihood of the resort to lynch law, unless there is a prompt conviction and a severe penalty imposed. . . is well known to exist.” (Indeed the state apparently deemed attempted rape more heinous than attempted murder—an offense for which no one in Virginia, Black or white, was executed after 1863.)

For decades to follow, Virginia’s Supreme Court—comprised entirely of white male jurists—aided and abetted what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun later described as a “machinery of death.” From 1908 to 1963, the court wrote opinions in 73 capital and non-capital cases of rape and related crimes; they reversed the sentences of approximately one-quarter of Black defendants compared to nearly two-thirds of white defendants.

Other states enforced similar laws. Louisiana also ran a two-tiered legal regime for rape prosecutions, effectively reserving its capital penalty for Black defendants charged with sexual assault on whites. Since 1900, the state has executed around 40 defendants for aggravated rape; all but two were Black. It has never executed a white man for the rape of a Black woman.  South Carolina has, since 1900, executed around 66 people for sexual crimes, of whom 61 were Black.  Florida has executed 48 men for rape and related crimes, of whom 44 were Black. And in Georgia, since 1900, 87 of the 93 men executed by the state for rape have been Black.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty for rape unconstitutional in 1977. But its decision in Coker v. Georgia hinged on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and never addressed the penalty’s longstanding racial intent and impact.  Had it done so, lower courts might have been on notice to protect against unconstitutional bias in the administration of rape laws by, for example, ensuring fair and deracialized jury selection, protecting against discriminatory prosecution, and guarding against the race tax in sentencing.

Instead, the execrable history of lynching and execution continued to infect rape prosecutions. Until DNA forensics became widely available about 20 years ago, countless innocent Black men were wrongly convicted for sexual assault.  Just 10 years ago, Black people were almost eight times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of rape. And just last year, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that Black prisoners incarcerated for sexual assault are over three times more likely to be innocent of the crime than white prisoners—and generally received far longer sentences than white exonerees.

This is not just a Virginia problem. But Virginians are grappling with this history head-on, and could lead the nation in a project of redress.  The state recently abolished the death penalty, in 2021. That year, then-governor Ralph Northam posthumously pardoned seven men who were executed after conviction on a 1951 rape charge that attracted international protest. Descendants of the Martinsville Seven, as the accused were known, had campaigned for the pardon. Northam was careful to specify that the pardon was not an exoneration; it was an acknowledgment that the men did not get a fair trial. “We all deserve a criminal justice system that is fair, equal, and gets it right,” he proclaimed.

This illustration was part of a 1951 Michigan petition mailed to then-Virginia Governor John S. Battle to save the “Martinsville Seven.” Their executions were carried out despite pleas for mercy from around the world. Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

By that measure—one none could quarrel with—there are, nationally, 1,073 rape executions that deserve posthumous redress. States could aim to correct these travesties by executive pardon, as with the Martinsville Seven, or by judicial action, as with John Henry James.  The U.S. courts might start admitting their own complicity in rushing Black men to their deaths. Localities might consider how prosecutors’ offices, like that of Albemarle County, can review historical cases to determine how many were rushed to judgment to avert mob violence, or otherwise shortchanged the process that was the defendant’s due.  They might also examine the actions of police, who often railroaded accused men by threatening to turn them over to the mob if they did not “confess.”

Manifestly, not every Black man executed for rape was innocent of the charge. But because none of these men got the due process or sentencing justice they deserved, perhaps all their cases must be re-examined. All of these men were hostages in the war for white supremacy. All of them were subjected to the meta-law of race. And all of them experienced law as a political weapon, rather than a set of neutral evidentiary rules.

State-endorsed redress and remedial measures, while inevitably insufficient, will help. They would also expiate slanders and stereotypes that, even in today’s courts and prosecutors’ offices, render the Black male “naturally” a potent threat to white females. When Dylann Roof shot down parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, his battle cry evinced the abiding nature of this group libel.  “Y’all are raping our white women, y’all are taking over the world,” he yelled, as he slaughtered.

The new sits solidly on top of the old here; race is the beginning and the end of this ongoing horror story. There is work to do, and Charlottesville prosecutors have sharpened their pencils and stretched their (and our) imaginations. The James case makes clear that the crimes of racialized justice must be lifted from the pages of books, criminology journals, and amicus briefs and placed in the public square. There, they can stimulate a community’s “ongoing commitment to . . . racial justice” and demonstrate the “importance of community remembrance projects,” as Hingeley, the prosecutor who helped clear James, observed.

The more of these historical travesties we tackle, the better off our legal system, and our nation, will be.

The post Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For all these reasons and more, said Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for the New York Times and moderator of yesterday’s discussion, “How Do Our Cities Prepare for The Post-Apocalypse?,” cities are now in a moment of reckoning.

“As we emerge from this pandemic,” she said, turning to the panel of politicians and scholars assembled online for the third event in the Zócalo/University of Toronto series The World We Want, we get to decide what’s next: “What is going to happen?”

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, stressed that the pandemic has emphasized how fragile the world’s most vulnerable communities remain today—and how that needs to change. Around 35 percent of Freetown’s population currently lives in informal settlements. Upgrading these communities and providing formal housing was something she’d made part of her three-year “Transform Freetown” platform, she said.

COVID showed just how desperate the situation was because the two key things needed to prevent the spread of the virus in the settlements—handwashing and social distancing—were untenable. “It just lit a bigger fire within me—increased that sense of urgency that a solution has to be found, not just in my city, but in cities around the world,” she said. This impacts everyone, she pointed out. “What the pandemic has shown is if we don’t get rid of virus in one country, we don’t get rid of virus anywhere.”

Serge Dedina, mayor of Imperial Beach, California, and executive director of Wildcoast, an international organization that addresses climate change, agreed—cities are part of a global community and need to think that way. Imperial Beach is on the U.S.-Mexico border, and he’s been vocal about ensuring that people across the border have access to vaccines. “If we don’t start working with Mexico to get vaccines going, we’re not going to recover here on the border as well,” he said.

For Samaneh Moafi, senior researcher at the human rights agency Forensic Architecture, the most powerful force to emerge from this year’s calamities was people working together to hold power accountable. “That was something that was so moving,” she said, noting some examples—including how, following the devastating explosion in Beirut last August, people from all walks of life didn’t just bear witness to the event, they recorded what was happening, and created what she termed “a poly-perspectival 3-D model,” which allowed for the development of a truth “that is not the high truth of the courts but a truth that is shared and rooted in citizens’ testimonies and acts of witnessing.”

University of Toronto professor and urbanist Richard Florida, meanwhile, mused on the power of community, which he saw play out on his own front porch. Last summer, he said, his family transformed their Toronto stoop into a space to sit and gather. “I didn’t know my neighbors before the summer,” he said. But the community-building opened up a whole new friendship circle.

Building community, the panelists agreed, is crucial for the health of cities. But for most people living in urban spaces, the pandemic has led to a crisis of connection that has gone unchecked.

“Community and family and connections matter more than ever,” said Dedina. “We’ve suffered as a result of not having those connections.” One way he’s looking to change that is by creating a Parks and Recreation Department for Imperial Beach, which does not currently have one. The city is seeking funding through grants and donations, and will also draw on funds from a new local sales tax, Measure I, to meet the moment. “Parks and Rec is a metaphor for democracy building, for community, for people talking to each other and hanging out with each other and being engaged,” Dedina said.

Aki-Sawyerr affirmed this point, saying that one of the key lessons Freetown learned when it faced the Ebola epidemic was that community had to be part of the solution. “You cannot solve a public health crisis, you cannot solve climate change, you can’t even solve the economic crisis we have without the involvement and the buy-in of the people in your city and the locality that you’re speaking about.”

What are other lessons of previous pandemics, asked Sengupta, the moderator.

Florida pointed out that modern handwashing—the powder room—is just a century old, and its rise followed the 1918 influenza.

Were there public policy interventions that were accelerated after that pandemic, Sengupta asked, which bear lessons for our present moment?

“There’s a good and not-so-good lesson,” said Florida, pointing out that the 1918 pandemic was not followed by a movement for social and racial justice, but instead ushered in the Roaring Twenties: “the most unequal, class-divided age of the robber barons.” So, he speculated, “What happens in the wake of pandemics is people recoil and rebound and maybe don’t double down quite immediately on conquering some of the social and economic challenges.”

On the other hand, he said, in the wake of the pandemic, “we did make basic shifts—not just in public health [but] in architecture,” whether that meant adding public space, parks, or modern restrooms to urban environments. “There were small adjustments in the way our cities were constructed that endured, but it took a while [to happen],” he said.

The panelists also answered questions from the audience that were asked in a live, YouTube chatroom. One participant wanted to know how informal settlements could be improved. Aki-Sawyerr offered a recent example from Freetown, where a fire in a settlement in March left 7,500 people homeless. Because of that catastrophe, she said, city officials decided that every settlement needs to clear out enough space to allow a firetruck to enter—no simple task, since people live in informal settlements because there is economic opportunity nearby, and making settlements safer means some of those people will need to move. “You cannot have the same number of people in that space and bring sanity to it,” said Aki-Sawyerr.

Other improvements to settlements, she said, could include better lighting and sanitation, and expanding roads.

Another audience member wanted to know: Do we stay and fight for cities vulnerable to climate change, or do cities make plans to move to higher ground?

Dedina said that Imperial Beach has some time before catastrophic flooding is expected, so the city has “to focus on adaptation first.” He’s pursuing natural approaches to combatting the effects of climate change and making cities more resilient, including replanting estuaries and restoring rivers. “We can go a long way before we talk about moving cities,” he said.

Looking ahead, Sengupta asked the panelists, what does a post-pandemic city look like?

Moafi hoped one change will be a rethinking of the ways that cities are policed. She called attention to tear gas, specifically. Across the world, from Hong Kong to the United States, its use is connected to “police brutality and environmental destruction,” she noted.

Dedina emphasized that outdoors is the “new tavern” for this generation. “More important than ever is get engaged, get people connected, foster outdoor activities and make the city a place where people can connect to nature”—something, he said, people need more than ever.

For Florida, cities will look, “for better and for worse,” a lot like they already do. “Too much has been made of this urban exodus” of people leaving big, dense cities, he said. He hopes that there’s an opportunity to remake central business districts of cities—“the last gasp of the industrial age” as more robust neighborhoods, but he fears that inequity in urban areas will continue grow. “That’s what really keeps me up at night,” he said.

Aki-Sawyerr said she doesn’t believe there is a post-pandemic world. “We’re in a world where we’re likely to see more pandemics,” she said, “but how do we structure the world where we can deal with this when the next one comes along?”

She shared one of her favorite expressions: How do you eat an elephant? The answer: One bite at a time.

“We have huge challenges globally,” she said. “We need to recognize there are vested interests that want things to stay where they are, and we need to continue to join the dots with those that actually believe that having more people have a better quality of life is overall better for all of us.”

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