THERE IS A DEEP BROODING IN ARKANSAS

A historical examination of rape trials in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow, with Maya Angelou as an important witness.

“The very first reported case heard in the Territory of Arkansas was a rape case,” writes legal historian Stern. That took place in 1820, occasioning a sentence of castration, commutation by the territorial governor, and an inconclusive series of laws that started with the death penalty for any convicted rapist and quickly devolved into two laws: a Black man would be put to death, but a white man would be sentenced for “not less than one year.” Fast-forward a century, and Jim Crow laws saw to it that Black people indeed died if convicted of rape—assuming they weren’t lynched first, lynching having been an important instrument of “keeping the Black population under control.” Stern looks closely at two contemporaneous cases, the one with Black defendants and the other with whites; the outcome was predictable, and even if the whites were imprisoned, it was in a comparative country club. Within this discussion emerges, both in testimonial and as moral compass, the writer Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson and raised in southwestern Arkansas in a town, as Stern writes, that “was an exceedingly dangerous place for Black people, especially Black men accused of rape.” Marguerite, raped as a young girl, knew sexual violence firsthand, yet she labored under a double shadow, since “Black activists”—men, mostly—“understandably shied from highlighting cases of Black men raping Black women or girls.” Even so, as Stern notes, Black women opened up that discussion, becoming agents for social change that would motivate Marguerite, now Maya, to become a pioneering feminist and to record her experiences in her writings, creating “something new, and newly vulnerable.”

A welcome study of racial justice and injustice.