Analysis Of Elizabeth Hale's 'Making Whiteness'

During the Jim Crow Era, widespread segregation came to limit bodily ownership for women of color, and placed restrictions on their individual freedoms by placing black women in a category below whites. African American women during the early and mid-twentieth centuries had to fight for the right to their own bodies due to the color of their skin, and were victim to legalized prejudice. However, these instances of discrimination were not taken lightly. Activists such as Rosa Parks sought to eliminate the legalized racism created by cases such as Plessy vs Ferguson, and sought justice for segregation, bodily protections, and equal protections under the law.
Race played a major role in women’s so called “freedom” in society, and in their protections by the legal system. In Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness, Hale discusses how white supremacy was created as a social movement in response to an increase of black freedom. In her book, Hale demonstrates the difference in punishment for violating a black woman’s body versus a white woman’s. During the early and mid-twentieth century, the rape of a white woman was punishable by death,
White women’s bodies were profoundly more protected by the legal system, and this was demonstrated through the prosecution of the men accused of assaulting them. In Ida B. Wels’s newspaper, Memphis Free Speech, she documented the lynching of “5 negroes” charged with “raping white women”, and their immediate assumed guilt because of the “old thread bear lie”, where black men were stereotyped as “black beast rapists”. Another instance of white protection was the trial of Henry Smith, who was “lynched for the alleged rape” of “Little Myrtle Vance” (Hale, Making Whiteness). Segregation worked to protect the bodies of white women over black women, and limited the amount of freedom women of color were able to obtain without access to equal