kosary2012

@InCollection{ kosary2012,
	author = {Rebecca A. Kosary},
	title = {'To Punish and Humiliate the Entire Community': White Violence Perpetrated against African-American Women in Texas, 1865--1868},
	pages = {327--351},
	crossref = {howell2012},
	year = 2012,
}

Relying primarily on reports of outrages and criminal offenses collected by the Freedmen’s Bureau, Kosary shows in vivid detail how “freedwomen were subjected to verbal, physical, and sexual assaults, torture, and murder during Reconstruction and they received little or no protection from local and state authorities.”

p. 343, n. 2:

Texas Freedmen’s Bureau agents recorded a total of 1681 incidents of violence against blacks; 281 perpetrated against black women and 25 against children [over three-year period?]. The “Report of Outrages,” however, does not specifically categorize either gender or age for either perpetrators or victims. The statistics used here with regard to violence against black women, thus represent only those incidents where the gender of the victim can be accurately determined. This is an especially difficult task, as many entries omit victims’ names and any explanation or circumstances surrounding the incident. These omissions … suggests that the number of black women victims is probably higher. Further, of the 281 incidents against black women, the majority (92 percent) were perpetrated by individuals; of the 21 incidents perpetrated by groups of 2 or more, one-third were crimes of a sexual nature.

Kosary discusses some of the pyschological and sexual motivations of the crimes, but also importantly considers slavery as an “institution that intimately entwined labor with power and violence” (p. 333), highlighting ways violence was used to counteract freedwomen’s economic independence and demand for pay.