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Black Men, Racial Stereotyping, and Violence in the U.S. South and Cuba at the Turn of the Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2000

Aline Helg
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

Two decades after the abolition of slavery, fear-inducing stereotypes of black men emerged in the U.S. South and Cuba that had not been pervasive before emancipation or in its immediate aftermath. Simultaneously, white antiblack violence reached unprecedented levels with the lynching of more than twenty-five hundred blacks in the U.S. South between 1884 and 1930, and the massacre of several thousand blacks in Cuba in 1912.Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence. An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 48–49; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 19–44; Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share. The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197, 225. Yet beyond this common trajectory toward racial stereotyping and violence, important differences existed in the ideas of these two former slave societies about the place blacks should occupy in freedom, the kinds of images that were applied to them, and the nature of the violence exercised against them.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2000 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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