Embedded Files
There are many black women who were legally executed for either being suspected of or for killing slave owners. That, along with what is known about black women and lynchings,* supports extant literature demonstrating black women's resistance to slavery and the racialization of executions.
Since my publication in Sexes, I have been able to verify at least 50 executions due to the murder of slave owners and/or families. I am happy to report that the previous statistics, were a serious under-count.
Summary of findings: Of 310 women who are unaccounted for in the Espy file, 195, thus far, are black women (62.9%). The end result leaves the proportion of black and white women about the same (58.3% versus 57.6% in the Espy file), BUT the percentage of white women in the updated dataset drops from comprising 40.1% (138 out of 364) of the Espy File to 28.1% (190 out of 674).
See also Professor Crenshaw's TED talk.
A listing of additional books and dissertations that consider intersectionality
A listing of additional books and dissertations that consider intersectionality
The below are a selection that have not already been mentioned on the site but, of course, see Baker's 2016 book. See also the literature cited at the very end of this page (*).
Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era by Barrett Foerster and Michael Meltsner
Race and the Death Penalty: The Legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp edited by David P. Keys and R.J. Maratea
Capital Punishment And Race Disparities In The Modern Era: An Empirical Analysis by Trevor Myers (Eastern Kentucky University).
The Death Penalty Seals Racial Minorities' Fate: The Unfortunate Realities of Being a Racial Minority in America by Sarah Garcia.
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Why study Lynching as different from state-sanctioned executions? Many reasons but perhaps it is a question of magnitude of hatred, racism, revenge, and a need to exercise control. But the line, for research purposes, requires definition. From Mary Church Terrell:
"If there were one particularly heinous crime for which infuriated people took vengeance upon the negro, or if there were a genuine fear that a guilty negro might escape the penalty of the law in the South, then it might be possible to explain the cause of lynching on some other hypothesis than that of race hatred. It has already been shown that the first supposition has no foundation in fact. It is easy to prove that the second is false. Even those who condone lynching do not pretend to fear the delay or the uncertainty of the law, when a guilty negro is concerned. With the courts of law entirely in the hands of the white man, with judge and jury belonging to the superior race, a guilty negro could no more extricate himself from the meshes of the law in the South than he could slide from the devil-fish’s embrace or slip from the anaconda’s coils. Miscarriage of justice in the South is possible only when white men transgress the law."
Source: Mary Church Terrell, "Lynching from a Negro's Point of View," North American Review, 178, (1904): 853-68. Retrieved from https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=3615
Baker, D. V., & Garcia, G. (2019). An Analytical History of Black Female Lynchings In The United States, 1838-1969. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology. https://doi.org/10.21428/88de04a1.105517eb
Equal Justice Initiative. (n.d.). Lynching in America: A community remembrance project. Retrieved from http://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-community-remembrance-project-2.pdf
Feimster, C. (2011). Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Harvard University Press.
Holden, V. M. (2021). Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community. University of Illinois Press
McLure, H. (2013). Who dares to style this female a woman?’ Lynching, gender, and culture in the nineteenth-century U.S. West. In M. Pfeifer (Ed.) Lynching beyond Dixie: American mob violence outside the South, 21-53. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
NAACP. (n.d.). History Lynching in America. Retrieved from https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america
National Library of Congress (n.d.) Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project 1936-1938. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/
Nunley, T. Y. (2015). The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime & Clemency in Early Virginia. The University of North Carolina Press.
Taylor, N. (2023). Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance (Cambridge University Press.
Wells-Barnett, I. (1895). A red record. Tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry and (1892) Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
An example of an execution in which the slave woman might have acted in self-defense
Source: Index Card Summary of Execution(s), Undated, M. Watt Espy Papers, 1730-2008. M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York (hereafter referred to as the Espy Papers).
https://media.archives.albany.edu/apap301/73d297c1c9af8f157cf676b311b96e4c/manifest.json
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