Post-emancipation scholarship redeployed the Jezebel myth to argue Black regression

Evidence

This caricature of the hypersexual Black woman persisted even after slavery was abolished. White scholars and politicians linked sexual stereotypes of Black women to claims that Black mothers procreated recklessly, passing socially damaging traits to their children. In The Plantation Negro as a Freeman, published after the Civil War in 1889, prominent historian Philip A. Bruce set the stage by presenting Black women’s sexual impurity as evidence that free Black people were regressing to a naturally immoral state. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 224

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Extends the immodesty-panic article’s thesis: the same moralization migrated from slave-era excuses to postbellum pseudo-scientific racism about ‘socially damaging traits.’
• XREF: The ‘naturally regressing’ framing is a durable American racial trope — echoes readings of Reconstruction-era racial ideology elsewhere.