Race
As observed in these graphs, the majority of the alleged offenders in the cases of rape that were reported on in The Caucasian were black, while the majority of the alleged victims where white. “Colored” is a somewhat amorphous category, which may have been used synonymously with “negro” or may have been used to describe mixed-race people. As both “colored” and “negro” were used concurrently and separately, I elected to separate them into differing categories for the sake of clarity. Being a southern newspaper, the race of the offenders was frequently reported on, even in the cases of white-on-white crime, but as race was not always taken into consideration in every article, it is worth considering that minorities may be overrepresented in this data, as they were more likely to have their race reported on as an identifying factor, than a white offender. There was not much change in the reporting of the alleged offenders’ race over time, or that of their alleged victims.
When looking at trends in interracial violence, the vast majority of such cases reported on in this paper constituted black-on-white alleged assaults. There are several reasons why this could be the case. The first is that cultural attitudes of the time put an emphasis on the beauty and purity of white women, and the comparative rapaciousness of black men as a justification for the political system of segregation. During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, “white newspapers publicized, justified, and sometimes explicitly incited the southern lynching frenzy that cemented the image of the rapist as a dangerous, beastly black male,” Estelle Freedman wrote. (Estelle Freedman, “”Crimes which startle and horrify”: Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, 3 (2011): 467-468) But another important thing to consider is context and the cultural definition of “rape” and “criminal assault” at the time. The majority of cases that were reported on in this era were violent assaults by strangers, and so the image of the black stranger attacking a white stranger could prove more potent in its social transgression than assaults that took place behind closed doors and within households.