The real threat at the time: White on black crime
If anything, white people represented a far larger threat to black people than the reverse, and whites frequently employed the myth of black criminality to justify their own violence. The Klan represented an especial threat, and in their campaign of terror against newly freed African Americans they beat, whipped, kidnapped, and even killed men and women they believed had transgressed racial boundaries.
Often, it was the supposed sexual threat that black men posed to white women that elicited a violent response. Whites, especially in the South, cited rape and an alleged need to protect white women as a chief justification for the thousands of lynchings perpetrated against African Americans between Reconstruction and the Second World War.
Alleged sexual violence also sparked outbreaks of mass violence against black communities, including the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot and the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma race riot. Even the most well-to-do whites rationalized their own violence as necessary in order to defend their own racial purity and protect themselves against black barbarism.
At the turn of the century, a cohort of black academics and activist journalists pushed back against the accusations that black people were uniquely criminal and their culture hopelessly dysfunctional. Most prominent among them were the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells.
In both his works
The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and
The Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906), Du Bois recontextualized statistical data to show that social and economic conditions were responsible for higher rates of black crime, disease and morbidity.
For her part,
Wells disproved the widely accepted belief that lynching occurred in response to sexual violence committed by black men. Instead, she showed, lynching was a strategy for whites to maintain social control of black people through fear. She also cast white men as the perpetrators of sexual violence, describing the very real threat they posed to black women who had essentially no access to social or legal recourse.
[12] The public failed to take the intellectual work of black men and women seriously, and it would be decades before their research reached the mainstream.
The Biggest Lie in the White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling the Truth About ‘Black-on-White Crime'