ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to convert the data into a narrative account that complicates the dominant interpretation of the racialization of rape in the late nineteenth century. The late nineteenth-century white press helped to cement an association between rape and race but with additional attention to the lynchings of African American men. A National Police Gazette illustration from 1889 highlighted the theme of rape as an invasion of the sanctity of the home and a denial of patriarchal authority. Defendants typically portrayed accusers as sexually experienced and thus incapable of refusing consent, often implying that they were duplicitous schemers making false charges. The cautionary tales provided by newspapers prescribed proper female comportment by implicitly instructing women readers how to avoid rape. The appearance of black women in rape reports further attests to an acknowledgment of resistance to assault in the late nineteenth century and revises the historical interpretation of the racialization of rape as a crime against white women.
