The Injustices of Rape: How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950–1980

The Injustices of Rape

GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Coeditors

Thadious M. Davis

Mary Kelley

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Cott

Jane Sherron De Hart

John D’Emilio

Linda K. Kerber

Annelise Orleck

Nell Irvin Painter

Janice Radway

Robert Reid-Pharr

Noliwe Rooks

Barbara Sicherman

Cheryl Wall

Emerita Board Members

Cathy N. Davidson

Sara Evans

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

Guided by feminist and antiracist perspectives, this series examines the construction and influence of gender and sexuality within the full range of America’s cultures. Investigating in deep context the ways in which gender works with and against such markers as race, class, and region, the series presents outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, including works in history, literary studies, religion, folklore, and the visual arts. In so doing, Gender and American Culture seeks to reveal how identity and community are shaped by gender and sexuality.

A complete list of books published in Gender and American Culture is available at www.uncpress.org.

CATHERINE O. JACQUET

The Injustices of Rape

How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950–1980

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jacquet, Catherine, author.

Title: The injustices of rape : how activists responded to sexual violence, 1950–1980 / Catherine O. Jacquet.

Other titles: Gender & American culture.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Series: Gender and American culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019011572 | ISBN 9781469653853 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469653860 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469653877 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Rape—Law and legislation—United States—History— 20th century. | Racism in criminology—United States—History— 20th century. | Human rights workers—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HV6561 .J33 2019 | DDC 364.15/32097309045—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011572

Portions of this book have been previously published in a different form. Chapter 2 includes material from The Giles-Johnson Case and the Changing Politics of Sexual Violence in the 1960s United States, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 188–211. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapters 3 and 4 include material from Fighting Back, Claiming Power: Feminist Rhetoric and the Resistance to Rape in the 1970s, Radical History Review 126 (October 2016): 71–83. Copyright © 2016 MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press (http://www.dukeupress.edu)

For Susan Porter Benson

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations in the Text

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Rape and the Law in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

CHAPTER TWO

Rape as Racial Injustice: Confronting Interracial Rape in the Black Freedom Movement

CHAPTER THREE

Rape Is a Political Crime against Women: An Emerging Feminist Analysis of Rape

CHAPTER FOUR

Defining the Injustices of Rape in the Joan Little Rape-Murder Case

CHAPTER FIVE

The Challenges of Antirape Activism in the 1970s

CHAPTER SIX

Rape and the Law in the Late 1970s

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1 Three of the Groveland Four 49

2 Giles-Johnson Defense Committee newspaper ad 64

3 New York Radical Feminists’ speak-out on rape poster 82

4 Disarm Rapists, Smash Sexism poster 93

5 Joan Little supporters 110

6 Justice Wanted for JoAnne Little poster 126

7 Washington Post page with articles on James Giles and Susan Brownmiller 134

Acknowledgments

When I was a little kid I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. My family was very supportive. I was further encouraged by my elementary school teachers, especially my second grade teacher Peggy Jorgensen and my fifth grade teacher Ruth Lindegren. Little did I know, that I would become a writer of sorts later in my life as a professional historian. In high school I discovered the awesomeness of history, thanks to my sophomore year history teacher Michael Batcheller who assigned us Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Looking back, this class was my root to eventually pursue the path to becoming a professional historian. As an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, I was privileged to work with Susan Porter Benson, Cornelia Dayton, and Jeffrey Ogbar. Their classes and mentoring all left a profound impression on me. I mention all of this here because in considering all of the threads that have brought me to where I am, it is these experiences and encounters of childhood and young adulthood that shaped who I would become later in life—a historian who shares her research through writing.

This book emerged out of both my evolving political consciousness and personal experience. Prior to graduate school I worked for two years at Simmons College. During this time I read the writings of second wave feminists, including Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will. I remember riding the bus to work and being furious at what I was learning. At this time I also began to develop a racial consciousness. I had been a fairly clueless white person prior to that, cloaked in my own white privilege. Through reading and attending lectures by scholars and activists like Barbara Smith, Leslie Feinberg, and Minnie Bruce Pratt during those years in Boston, I learned a lot about the world around me and my own positionality in it. When I arrived at graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago I was incredibly fortunate to learn from historians including Jennifer Brier, John D’Emilio, Leon Fink, Sue Levine, and Katrin Schultheiss. It was also in that first year of graduate school that the reality of rape would come with full force into my life. Someone I loved was violently raped and it altered the course of my academic career. I turned to books to try and understand and process what had happened. I began reading about 1970s feminist antirape activism, and the seeds of this manuscript were planted. This book, then, is a testament to both my development as a professional historian and my political commitments to fighting against the devastation and pervasiveness of white supremacy and gender injustice.

I am incredibly grateful to friends, colleagues, and mentors who have supported me along the way. I would be completely lost without the support, wisdom, and friendship of so many people. During a post-doc at Macalester College, Lynn Hudson and Jane Rhodes took me under their wing. I can’t thank them enough for their continued friendship, guidance, and hilarity over the years. At LSU, I elected Jonathan Earle, Leslie Tuttle, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Alecia Long as my local mentors—unbeknownst to them—and they have always obliged. I am grateful to each of them for their support and their friendship. I may not have ever finished the manuscript if Aaron hadn’t threatened to never invite me over for homemade shrimp and grits again if I didn’t get it done. His strategy worked and I have since benefited from many shared meals with Aaron, Megan, Annie, and Liam. Aaron also read drafts and insisted that I knew what I was talking about, even when I wasn’t so sure. I cannot thank him enough for everything he has done for me. I am incredibly fortunate to work with so many amazing colleagues in the history department at LSU. Chuck Shindo, Christine Kooi, and Maribel Dietz have been good friends and colleagues. The former junior faculty writing group read and gave feedback on several of the chapters included here. All my thanks to Zevi Guttfreund, Devon Benson, Steve Andes, Brendan Karch, Asiya Alam, Kodi Roberts, and Sherri Johnson for their thoughtful responses. I’ve been lucky to find amazing community outside of the history department at LSU as well. I am deeply appreciative to Micha Rahder and Reagan Mitchell for all of their queer love and friendship. Likewise, Solimar Otero and Eric Mayer-Garcia have been the best kind of friends a girl could ask for—thoughtful, passionate, and always ready to celebrate the goodness of life with a bottle of prosecco. This book would not have been possible without all of these people—and so many more—who believed in the project and in me. I am particularly grateful to John D’Emilio who, despite retiring, remains my forever advisor. John is not only a model of academic excellence but also a good and kind human being, plain and simple. Thank you, John, for modeling for me the kind of academic that I wanted to be. You continue to mentor and encourage me in so many ways, and I am truly grateful.

Special shout out to my friends in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago who saw very early drafts of what would eventually become this book. Many thanks to the history hens writing group: Emily Twarog, Katie Batza, Mark Bullock, Anne Parsons, Lara Kelland, Kim Rorie, and Elizabeth Collins. I am so grateful to the scholars who took an interest and supported me at various stages of this project. Thank you Cynthia Blair, Jennie Brier, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Susan Levine, Garthine Walker, Raymond Douglas, and Sharon Johnson. My deepest gratitude to the scholars, activists, and lawyers whom I interviewed or who read portions of the manuscript and provided feedback. For sharing parts of your life histories with me I thank Susan Brownmiller, Debbie Friedman, David Kendall, Robin McDuff, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and Jennifer Wriggins. For taking the time to read and give me feedback on sections of the manuscript, I thank Raymond Douglas, David Kendall, Michael Meltsner, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Jennifer Wriggins. It is a true testament to their generosity that all of these people—most of whom had never met me—immediately agreed to read and respond to my work. The anonymous readers of the manuscript provided invaluable feedback, which significantly shaped the book. I am indebted to you both for the care and attention that you gave to this manuscript. Thank you to all of the librarians and archivists who helped me in my research at libraries and archives across the country. At LSU, J. Matthew Ward was a truly fantastic research assistant and I am so appreciative of his work in the late stages of this project. Mark Simpson-Vos has been the best editor I could have imagined and I am deeply indebted to him and the team at the University of North Carolina Press for everything you all have done for me and this book.

I received funding at various stages of this project, which made my research possible. At UIC I was awarded funding from the History Department, the Provost’s Award for Graduate Research from the Graduate College, and the Alice J. Dan Dissertation Award from the Center for Research on Women and Gender. At Louisiana State University I received a Summer Stipend Award from the Office on Research and Economic Development. This manuscript also benefitted tremendously from the feedback and comments from audience members at a variety of venues. Thank you to the organizers and audiences at the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Rape (Virginia Tech, April 2016), the Historicizing Rape Conference (University of Cardiff, July 2015), the Workshop on the Comparative History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Minnesota, April 2014), the University of Kansas Gender Seminar (Lawrence, March 2014), and the Newberry Seminar on Gender and Sexuality at the Newberry Library (Chicago, October 2009).

I am very grateful to the community of scholars whose work on the history of sexual violence has inspired me and made my own thinking on the subject possible. I am truly standing on the shoulders of giants. Of that group, I am particularly indebted to Estelle Freedman, Danielle McGuire, Diane Miller Sommerville, and Lisa Lindquist Dorr. I would not be here with this completed book if they hadn’t paved or otherwise shown me the way.

I am lucky to have made amazing friends in grad school who still make me laugh, support me, and remind me of what is good in the world. Matthew Popovich was my first grad school friend, and he continues to be an affirming, kind, and funny presence in my life. Michael Gill and Neslihan Sen were my partners in crime during our years in WGS at UIC. They are dear friends and I am forever grateful for their friendship. Elizabeth Collins has been the best history partner imaginable. I would not have survived the Academy without her. I appreciate her wit, sass, and wisdom every day. Anne Parsons is truly one of a kind. Her commitment to engaged scholarship and social justice reminds me of why we do what we do. She approaches life with grace, charm, and wisdom that I can only hope to emulate.

I am so grateful to my amazing community of friends—both within and outside the borders of the Academy—who have fed me, housed me, made me laugh, or otherwise nurtured my soul. Included in that group are Heidi and Levi Truax, Owen DMC and Jesse Plotsky, KJ Preston, Julie Sweet, Bastian Parsons, Eunjung Kim, Leslie Jerkins, Camille Adams and Mike Killelea, Kathy Lessard and Ann Barry, Amy Sullivan and Andy Wright, Natalie Evans and Jerry Busser, Elaine Maccio and Sherry Desselle, Liz Stigler and Aster Gilbert, Ashley Mog and Ellie Vainker, and my girls from the old school: Caitlin Chang, Emily DeBruicker, Kate Heekin, and Maria Fisher.

I am also incredibly lucky to have a supportive and amazing family. My parents, Josée and Dominique, may not always understand my academic life, but they have always believed in me and encouraged me. Je vous aime tous les deux. My sister Isabelle was always one of my biggest fans and she loved me unconditionally. I don’t know who I would be without her. She is not here to see this finished product, but I know she would be so proud of her little sister. Special thanks to my stepmom Viv and younger sister, Julie, for cheering me on and loving me. Robin Roberts is stuck with me for life and I am forever grateful for her continued love and friendship. Finally, I owe more than I can say to my partner extraordinaire, Liam Lair. Thank you, Liam, for supporting me through this book and through our life together. Thank you for being a dedicated educator, a loyal friend, a warrior for justice, a fellow academic nerd, and for always pushing me to do better and be better in life. You are my favorite and I appreciate you every day.

I dedicate this book to Susan Porter Benson. She took me under her wing when I was an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut and she—more than anyone else—is the reason I followed the path to where I am today. I decided in my first year of graduate school that I would dedicate my first book to her. And although she is not here to see it, I know she would be so proud. Thank you, Sue.

Abbreviations in the Text

ACLU WRP

American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project

BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

BPP

Black Panther Party

CORE

Congress of Racial Equality

CWAR

Chicago Women Against Rape

DC RCC

Washington, D.C., Rape Crisis Center

DWAR

Detroit Women Against Rape

FAAR

Feminist Alliance Against Rape

FAMU

Florida A&M University

JLDF

Joann Little Defense Fund

LEAA

Law Enforcement Assistance Administration

NAACP LDF

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund

NBFO

National Black Feminist Organization

NIMH

National Institute of Mental Health

NOW

National Organization for Women

NYRF

New York Radical Feminists

SCWAR

Santa Cruz Women Against Rape

SFWAR

San Francisco Women Against Rape

SLF

Seattle Liberation Front

SNCC

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

SPLC

Southern Poverty Law Center

WAR

Women Against Rape

WASP

Women Armed for Self-Protection

WCC

Women’s Correctional Center

The Injustices of Rape

Introduction

In February 1974, Delbert Tibbs, a black man who was traveling through Florida, was questioned by state police about the rape of a white woman and the murder of her boyfriend. Although he did not fit the description of the assailant, Tibbs was arrested, brought to trial, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to death.¹

Later that year, Linda Scott, a black sex worker, alleged that Pete Cole, a middle-class white man, had brutally raped her in Dallas. At the October trial, Cole did not take the stand, nor was he required to, while Scott was questioned relentlessly for hours about her past sexual history.² The jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

The cases of Tibbs, the innocent defendant, and Scott, the mistreated victim, each sit at a particular crossroads of rape and race, class, and gender. Their experiences reflect patterns commonly seen in mid-twentieth century American rape trials.³ In Tibbs’s case, an innocent black man was accused and convicted of interracial rape. In Scott’s case, a rape victim faced excessively harsh treatment in the courts. In their encounters with the legal system, neither Tibbs nor Scott found justice. However, both Tibbs and Scott did find support from racial and gender justice activists, who were addressing both the issues of wrongful convictions and excessive punishments of alleged black rapists, as well as addressing the disbelief in, excessive scrutiny of, and mistreatment of female rape victims in the aftermath of their assaults. Activists recognized these cases as evidence of the enormous inadequacies of the American legal system for certain victims and certain accused perpetrators in cases of rape.

Taken together, these cases offer an opening into the world of antirape activism in the mid-1970s. At this time, two major social movements were addressing sexual violence—the black freedom movement and the women’s liberation movement. The Injustices of Rape examines the work of activists in those two movements who initiated unprecedented changes in the medical, legal, and social responses to rape from 1950 to 1980. The book chronicles how activists articulated a politics of rape during this period, identifying sexual violence as a critical site of injustice and developing theories and strategies to respond to that injustice. In so doing, activists posed challenges to the dominant legal and social discourses on men, women, and rape, and they defined the political agenda on sexual violence for over three decades.

While activists in both the black freedom and women’s liberation movements organized major campaigns in response to rape, they rarely worked in coalition with one another. Following a pattern seen historically in antirape organizing in the United States, no unified antirape coalition emerged across movements during this stretch of time. As a result, there were sometimes quite significant differences in the dominant discourses on rape coming out of the black freedom and women’s liberation movements. These discourses—and the challenges to them—are the focus of this book. However, while these two distinct movements for social justice organized separately in response to rape, activists themselves belie such a neat delineation. Black feminists, for example, articulated an analysis of rape that sat at the intersection of the black freedom and women’s liberation movements. These activists challenged the distinctions between a racial justice and a gender justice agenda, arguing instead that true racial justice included an analysis of patriarchal oppression, while true gender justice included an analysis of racism and white supremacy.⁴ This intersectional analysis, however, was not foregrounded by the larger black freedom or women’s liberation movements. This lack of attention to intersectionality would lead to major contestations both within and between these social justice movements.

By 1980, racial and gender justice activists had brought a sea change to the understandings of and responses to rape, resulting in a world that would have been largely unrecognizable to observers in the 1950s. During the 1950s, significant race and gender biases in the law left most black and white women rape victims vulnerable to injustice. Midcentury psychiatry supported long-held legal fears that women frequently falsely accused innocent men of rape. The white legal community largely understood black women, historically constructed as hypersexual and lascivious, as essentially unrapeable. As a result, female victims of sexual assault across race often encountered a hostile legal environment when alleging rape, and successful prosecutions were difficult. While the law responded to individual cases of rape, sexual violence did not figure prominently, if at all, in larger national and political concerns, and there were few resources available for victims. Conversely, a significant race bias also left many black men vulnerable when accused of raping white women. Rape was punishable by death in all Southern states, and black men convicted of interracial rape faced disproportionately harsher sentences as compared to their white counterparts. In response to these realities, activists for racial and gender justice pursued major antirape efforts over the next thirty years, challenging the prevailing order and the assumptions that supported it.

During the postwar era, fighting against rape was one of the major battlegrounds in the larger quest for racial justice. Continuing a tradition that stretched back to the nineteenth century, activists in the mid-1940s mounted significant campaigns in defense of black women who were attacked by white men and who subsequently found no justice in the criminal legal system in the Jim Crow South. These campaigns were both local and national in scope and were one of many ways that African American women claimed the rights of citizenship, the rights to equal justice before the law, and the right to bodily autonomy. Concurrently, racial justice activists rallied to the cause of black men who, when accused of raping white women, were victimized by whites and a white-dominated legal system, particularly in the South. Attending to these injustices of rape took on renewed intensity when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF) launched a campaign against capital punishment in the early 1960s on behalf of all convicted black rapists on death row. In confronting the legal system, black activists posed a sharp challenge to the rampant racism and inequality that pervaded their lives.

During the early 1970s, feminists came to their own understanding of sexual violence as a tool of patriarchal oppression. Initially emerging from a majority white group, the feminist antirape analysis figured centrally in antisexist organizing alongside issues like reproductive rights, workplace justice, and health care. During the 1970s, feminists identified rape myths that, they argued, maintained women’s inferior status and endangered their lives and safety. Although they were not the first to politicize and agitate in response to sexual violence in the twentieth century, feminists offered a dramatic departure from previous campaigns against rape. They stormed city halls and district attorneys’ offices; they demonstrated in the streets and held speak-outs, conferences, and workshops; in cities and towns across the country they organized women against rape (WAR) groups; and they created the first rape crisis centers and hotlines to assist survivors of violence. They created a visible and widely acknowledged submovement within women’s liberation that actively focused on sexual violence. While feminists were by no means the only voices articulating a political position on rape, by the mid-1970s theirs was the dominant voice.

Racial and gender justice activists came to their antirape analyses from their own respective frameworks of injustice, and this had important consequences for antirape campaigns—who activists supported, the injustices they identified, and the kinds of changes they sought. The larger black freedom movement politicized rape as a tool of white supremacy. Theorizing rape within a larger framework of racism, activists concentrated their attention solely on interracial sexual violence. Mobilization efforts centered on black women assaulted by white men as well as black men accused of raping white women. These efforts were necessary and critically important. Yet the politicization of rape as racial injustice left out the largest group of black rape victims: black women assaulted by black men.⁵

Likewise, within the predominantly white women’s movement of the 1970s, feminist activists initially politicized rape almost exclusively within a larger framework of sexism and gender injustice. This reflected a tendency within the women’s movement at the time to focus on gender as the primary cause of oppression in women’s lives, excluding other social factors such as race or class. Using this analytical frame, white feminists theorized rape only as the result of sexism and male supremacy. Thus, any woman assaulted by any man was politically salient to the movement, regardless of race. This opened up space for addressing both interracial and intraracial sexual violence. However, most white feminists involved in antirape campaigns focused their energies solely on women victims and did not typically consider those black men who were victims of legal injustice, whether they were falsely accused of or excessively punished for rape.

While these discourses dominated the black freedom and feminist movements’ antirape agendas, they were fiercely challenged by activists within the movements’ ranks. Some black women activists called attention to intraracial sexual abuse within the black freedom movement during the 1960s, though their analysis was never taken up by the larger movement, which remained focused on interracial sexual violence. While an antirape agenda emerged largely from white feminists in the early 1970s, sexual violence was always a critical issue for women of color, who both demanded that their voices be heard and agitated throughout the 1970s for an intersectional approach to antirape activism. As antirape activist Loretta Ross has asserted, the problem is not a lack of black women’s participation … but a lack of documentation of that participation.⁶ The white-dominated feminist antirape movement diversified over the course of the 1970s, and black feminists sharply critiqued the movement’s narrow conceptualization of rape as gendered oppression without a substantial racial analysis. They were joined by antiracist white feminists, oftentimes who identified themselves as socialist feminists, who also pushed the larger movement to fully integrate a racial analysis into the larger antirape agenda. These critiques counter the notion of a monolithic feminist approach to rape and reflect the internal tensions and debates amongst feminist activists as they sought to respond to the injustices of rape. Yet despite efforts to the contrary, an approach that exclusively prioritized gender without a significant racial analysis continued to dominate the larger feminist discourse on rape throughout the decade.

Regardless of their analytical roots in sometimes narrowly defined racial or gender oppression, activists across both the black freedom and women’s liberation movements understood rape as a crime committed by a man against a woman or girl. Male victims of rape were almost entirely absent in both movements’ politicization of sexualized violence, despite the fact that there was an emergent and growing concern over sexual violence in men’s prisons at the time. As historian Regina Kunzel has documented, beginning in the late 1960s, a new surge of writing about prison life, was fully focused on male sexual victimization.⁷ Yet this manifestation of sexual violence was not taken up in a significant way by activists in either the black freedom or women’s liberation movements. And outside of the prison context, male victimization remained largely ignored. The male perpetrator–female victim model reflected centuries-old understandings of the crime of rape that continued into the late twentieth century. Although the black freedom movement understood black men accused of interracial rape as victims, these men were victimized by white supremacy and racism; they themselves were not the victims of rape. In fact, the concept of black male victimization by the legal system did not disrupt the male attacker–female victim paradigm, since in these cases it was always women who brought charges against men. Women’s liberation further reinforced this denial of male victimization. As members of the Chicago Women Against Rape declared, rape, we must remember, is a crime; women are the victims of it.⁸ Regardless of race and class, the perpetrator of sexual violence was always male and the victim always female—in neither analysis was there room for male victims of sexual assault.⁹ This perpetuated the silence around male rape and ignored the reality in which men—not just women—were the victims of sexualized violence.¹⁰

As activists called attention to the current crisis of rape from the standpoints of antiracism and/or antisexism, they also historicized that injustice, arguing that the present problems had deep historical roots. Racial justice and feminist activists saw rape in their own time as the continuation of decades, if not centuries, of unchecked abuse. From an activist perspective, deeply entrenched beliefs about gender and race had created and maintained injustices in the law, medicine, and society at large. The long-standing oppression of these histories of injustice informed how activists pursued antirape activism and gave additional weight to the urgency of change.

Activists’ recognition or dismissal of histories of injustice informed how they defined the problem of rape and what needed to be done about it—their analyses did not always align, nor did their solutions. These conflicts occurred both between and within social justice movements. As they took up the cause of rape victims, black and white feminists in the 1970s sometimes found themselves in stark opposition to leftist traditions of defending the rights of the accused, particularly black men accused of raping white women. Many interpreted the feminist demand for victims’ rights as a threat to the successes of the movement on behalf of defendants. In identifying different histories of injustice with different victims, these groups at times offered competing solutions for change, which put them at odds with one another. In this case, finding either racial or gender justice through the legal system, without undermining the pursuit of the other, appeared quite difficult. This issue also caused tension within feminism, as some antiracist white and women of color activists critiqued the reliance on the criminal legal system as an effective strategy. These activists argued that relying on a sexist and white supremacist legal system was ultimately counterintuitive to the goals of liberation. While antiracist and feminist activists agreed that the criminal legal system had failed to adequately respond to sexual violence, they did not always agree between or among themselves on what those failures were or how to effectively address or resolve them.

The potential for discord between and within movements was compounded in the mid-1970s as the state became increasingly involved in antirape efforts. As feminists agitated on behalf of victims and made searing critiques of the state’s inability to protect women and prosecute crime, legal and political elites recognized the necessity of reform. In the context of increased national anxieties over crime and criminality more generally, a reactionary call for law and order, and a vocal national victims’ rights movement, feminist calls for improved responses to and services for rape victims quickly garnered the attention of state authorities. While many feminists initially contested increased reliance on the state, others saw legal reform as a necessary step toward justice for rape victims. Increased protection for victims, however, threatened to further empower a legal system historically hostile to minority defendants. Racial justice activists were especially wary of increased intervention by the state, given the history of unchecked state violence against and abuse of black people. While some feminists agreed, warning against the dangers of relying on a historically racist and sexist state for protection, the push for reform dominated as the state became a key player in antirape efforts.

At times, the interests of the black freedom and women’s liberation movements converged, and activists were able to find common ground. Despite a discourse that often suggested otherwise, the rights of victims and the rights of defendants were not by definition antithetical, nor did increasing the rights of one group necessarily mean decreasing those of the other. In some instances, activists had a shared critique of the state and a shared understanding of solutions that would benefit both defendants and accusers. The campaign to abolish the death penalty as punishment for rape serves as an example. As a punishment that targeted primarily black men, the death penalty was a major concern of advocates for defendants’ rights. Activists for victims’ rights also shared a concern over capital punishment. From their perspective, the severity of the punishment kept convictions low, thus further hindering victims’ access to justice. In this case, limiting the reach of the carceral state benefitted both defendants and victims, and activists in both groups were thus able to find consensus on the issue. Moments like these reveal that while having to negotiate in relation to each other and an increasingly interventionist state, activists could unite at the intersections of their respective antirape politics.

While activists recognized enduring histories of injustice, they didn’t always recognize the histories of activism in response to rape that had preceded them. Indeed, when racial and gender justice activists took up antirape organizing in the mid- to late twentieth century, they were continuing a tradition of testimony and protest against rape that dated back over a hundred