Enslaved women who resisted sexual assault were punished brutally by sale, maiming, or death

Evidence

Since Black women had no right to deny sex to their enslavers, they had no right to defend themselves against forced sex. Enslaved women who successfully fought off enslavers who tried to assault them were sold away from their families, gruesomely maimed, or executed. In 1850, within a year of his wife’s death, a white Missouri farmer named Robert Newsom purchased a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia for the purpose of having sex with her. He raped Celia for the first time on the journey home from the sale. Newsom put Celia up in a tiny cabin on his farm and there continued to rape her repeatedly over the course of five years. Celia gave birth to at least one child resulting from Newsom’s assaults. In the summer of 1855, Celia begged Newsom to stop because she was sick and pregnant and warned him that she would resist his advances. She began to keep a large stick in the corner of her cabin to protect herself. When Newsom ignored her pleas and came to her cabin on the night of June 23, 1855, Celia clubbed him twice over the head with the stick, killing him. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 220

Categorization

• CANDY: The Celia story has a grim courtroom-drama quality — a named, dated, concrete case that stays with you and is easy to retell.
• SEED: A narrative nonfiction piece could reconstruct Celia’s trial as a paradox: a murder statute protecting ‘any woman’ explicitly excluded an enslaved woman — the law’s own language as the smoking gun of chattel logic.