NCJ Number
212241
Journal
Women & Criminal Justice Volume: 16 Issue: 1/2 Dated: 2005 Pages: 29-64
Date Published
2005
Length
36 pages
Annotation
This article examines the harsh punishments and treatment of Black females in the southern justice system and discusses the ideas of Negro primitivism and gender parity as viable explanations for this phenomenon.
Abstract
An examination of the data regarding female executions in the United States reveals that 49 women have been executed since 1900. A closer look at the details of several of the cases shows that the majority of Black women who were executed had murdered a domestic employer, nearly all had committed their crimes in the South, and most had murdered a White victim. The harsh treatment and punishment of these women can be traced to the scientific theories conceptualized during the Victorian era and the early 20th century which characterized Blacks as uncontrollable, uncivilized brutes and naturally predisposed miscreants. This characterization resulted from a convergence of Social Darwinistic individualism, the eugenics movement, and a conservative Protestant philosophy espousing the divinely ascribed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. This perspective not only made racism respectable, but provided a scientifically based logic for legislation and social policies that justified an inordinate number of death sentences for violent Black offenders, as well as their disproportionately high representation among the overall prison population of the South during this time. These theoretical assumptions slowly permeated nearly every element of American popular culture, filtering outward from academic and political realms to mainstream society, thus legitimizing the harsh treatment of Blacks in the criminal justice system. This article examines in detail the trial and execution of Rosanna Phillips, the first Black female executed in North Carolina, and looks at how her case reaffirmed and perpetuated the systematic symbolic social construction of the Negro as ‘primitive.’ Notes, references