Sexual Violence Against Black Women Continues Systemically After Emancipation

The systematic rape of Black women, which had been a defining feature of slavery, continued after emancipation with the same legal impunity. Courts uniformly refused to recognize rape charges brought by Black women against white men. The KKK and Redeemer paramilitaries used rape as a terror tactic: congressional investigations in 1871–1872 documented hundreds of cases of white men raping Black women during night-riding raids. In the Memphis Massacre of 1866, 5 Black women were documented as raped; investigators noted many more cases went unreported. The rape of Black women by white men was effectively legal throughout the South until the mid-20th century.