Post-emancipation black citizenship claims triggered white sexual-panic violence

Evidence

Such fears can produce cycles of racial moral panics in which black people are viewed as a threat to everything we hold dear. That perception shapes public sentiment and informs public policy debates as people call for directed efforts to address the crisis. For example, after emancipation, white fears about black male sexual desire for white women unleashed unimaginable terror and violence throughout the South. (Black women were always the object of sexual terrorism, during and after slavery, but never mind.) Black men dared to assert their equal standing in public life during this period, to assert their manhood. The idea of black manhood, expressed through full citizenship and evidenced in voting and economic success, produced fears of black men sleeping with white women. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Distinct from, yet parallel to, the moral-panic dynamics in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ and my prior Cohen reading — a further case of panic as class/political signaling.