Even antiracist scholars blamed Black criminality for lynchings

Evidence

President Roosevelt was speaking to a national choir of scholars. In Pure Sociology (1903), Brown sociologist and former abolitionist Lester Ward had claimed that Black men who lusted after and raped White women and the White mobs who lynched them in retaliation were both ordered by their racial nature to do so. … Even Du Bois complained, in a 1904 Atlanta University study (“Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia”), that there were “enough well authenticated cases of brutal assaults on women by black men” to “make every Negro bow his head in shame.” Negroes must recognize, he said, their responsibility for their own so-called worst classes. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 780

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The chasm between modern hindsight and the era’s scholarship — Du Bois, of all people, conceding cases of Black-on-white assault ‘make every Negro bow his head’ — shows how even antiracists absorbed victim-blaming frames, undercutting any assumption that good faith plus knowledge yields clear sight.
• DEFINE: Useful raw evidence for placing Du Bois’s self-blame discourse within Kendi’s assimilationist category.