Abstract

Using the work of Richard Wright and personal interviews to portray racial interactions in the Jim Crow South, I illustrate how law enforcement used racial and sexual assaults to maintain black subordination. Jim Crow racism constituted a caste system in which one’s race was determined, not primarily by how one looked, but by one’s ancestry. I review and reject Oliver Cox’s thesis that caste did not exist in the Jim Crow South, and cite continuing examples of physical and sexual assaults against individuals based on racial, gender, and caste differences.