From 1882 – 1968, an estimated 4,743 men were lynched in the United States, often after an accusation of rape, prompting the NAACP to claim ‘[w]hites started lynching because they felt it was necessary to protect white women’.
We now know that many of these women lied, and men died.
Emmet Till was only 14 years old when he was beaten to death for the crime of ‘whistling at a white woman’. Many years later, Carolyn Brant admitted that she lied, to protect her husband. They went on to profit financially from the boy’s death. Till was hardly alone. A mob of 1500 beat and hung three Black circus workers in Duluth, after a white woman made an apparently false accusation of rape.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gilbert King chronicles the lives and deaths of the black men falsely accused of sexual assault in his book, Devil in the Grove.
The history of lynching in the United States is inextricably interwoven with the history of women lying about sexual assault. Last month Teen Vogue writer Emily Lindin cheerfully resigned herself to innocent men being made to suffer if women lie, as the price of ending “patriarchy”, seemingly incapable of understanding that she would not be the one paying the price. This is the same thought process of the women who lied to force the Southern trees to bear their strange fruit.
Billie Holiday, one of the best jazz vocalists in American history, recorded her mournful masterpiece “Strange Fruit” in 1939, describing the sight of men’s burnt and beaten bodies, hanging from trees and lampposts in the South, after mob retribution.
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
The song was later updated by Kanye West to include a discussion of predatory women hoping to become pregnant by rich men. West samples the Nina Simone recording of “Strange Fruit,” linking his depiction of rapacious black women with malicious white women who lied about sexual assault.
The recent epidemic of powerful, mostly liberal, white men accused of sexual impropriety, harassment, assault and rape has been accompanied by a dogged insistence that the women accusers could not be lying, predatory, or motivated by malice or financial gain. This is a curious revision of history, in which the women who prompted up to one third of all the lynchings that occurred in the United States through false accusations of rape, are suddenly evolved beyond their sisters of an earlier age.
The trouble with women is that they are human beings, and human beings have a terrible capacity to be flawed, often egregiously so. Culturally, we have little problem accepting that men can be malevolent, predatory and exploitative, because we understand that men are human beings. We have considerably more difficulty accepting that women are human beings, too.
Some of the men accused of harassment and assault may very well be guilty. They are all being subject to the digital mob, lynched in cyberspace. How many of the lynched men of the South were innocent? Has mob justice ever meted out a fair and just reward?
The strange fruit that once hung abundantly from the poplar trees should remind us that women can, and do lie.
Women lie.
But men die.
Janet Bloomfield is a shield maiden in the culture wars. Her book FeminISN’T is available on Amazon.
Kiran
December 12, 2017 at 12:30 pm
I’ll be Emily Lindin is an avid Black Lives Matter supporter. The irony is just delicious. She wants to throw us back to a time where women could kill men with a word, specifically white women killing black men. Calling her “un-evolved” would be putting it mildly.
Jonathan
December 12, 2017 at 11:17 pm
Thank you for this article. The past month and a half has opened the gates to say against powerful men who hid behind the trappings of their office to hide their victimization of women. Oddly enough though, above the deluge there was always a “burning smell”, unfamiliar but unmistakable…. THIS article is what it smelled like… The unsettling notion that in the midst of all this hysteria something just doesn’t seem totally right.
Menckens Ghost
December 12, 2017 at 11:21 pm
Sugar and spice and all things narcissistic.
Becky
December 14, 2017 at 10:53 am
First of all, no one is going to die today because they were accused of whistling at, sexually harassing or even raping someone. They certainly aren’t going to be dragged out of their homes by a mob, beaten, tortured and then lynched in public for doing so. They may or may not be charged and then have to appear in court, where a jury of their peers will judge them accordingly. Something that never happened in that photo above. So this comparison is at best, grossly perverse or at worst…dude…I don’t even know…a complete denial of our history and what really went down back then? A mockery of those lives lost as a result of racial injustice and extreme prejudice? Sure. People lie. All people. Not just women. In fact, if the argument for claiming all of these accusations are lies is that “human beings have a terrible capacity for being flawed,” then it would be fair to say that we could believe no person, ever, for anything, period, the end and just let all the criminals run free. And that’s just a ridiculous way to go about things.
Boy Bye
December 14, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Well,uhm, actually in this day and age, the repercussions of a false accusation are loss of job, loss of ability to have a job, social hatred, financial devestation, and possibly prison, all based on an accusation that can be decades old, needs no evidence, and will be wildly encouraged by the left.
So yeah, this article is spot on.
Also, since you asked nicely, the claim that only 3% of rape accusations are false came from a feminist writer/professor with zero evidence or studies to back it up.
The people who actually work in the legal system and track these things put the number at 20% – 40%.
So thanks for your opinion. It is really super appreciated!
Bookish1
December 14, 2017 at 11:33 am
Interesting article. I was mystified at how many RINO’s found Roy Moore’s accusers “credible.”
When women can claim that a man molested them 4 decades earlier, while they were underage — with absolutely no evidence — and be called “credible,” all men ought to be wary.
wGraves
December 15, 2017 at 2:55 am
I believe that there is a remedy in law. If the accuser bore false witness, in the common law, which we recognize, there are remedies in the torts of perjury and liable. We need a fund to take down any of these accusers who cannot prove their allegations. The loss of a job an injury to reputation are actionable.