Mississippi Quotes

This is but one of the quotations of someone who was a major force in perpetuating the old slavery era myth that “Negros” were not only inferior to whites, but they were unable to develop morality or repress their sexual urges. Dr. Howard was generally castigated by his professional colleagues, but he was quite popular with the general public for whom he wrote a number of books and magazine articles.

This early New England law illustrates some interesting aspects of Colonial law enforcement and philosophy. Massachusetts was perhaps the most religiously rigid and orthodox of the colonies. Yet in the case of rape, they did not always follow the Mosaic Law as some other colonies did. Instead, they had the concept of judicial discretion built into their sentencing. The other point of interest is that there was an “age of consent” albeit, for a female it was 10 years old.

This proverb which actually has the force of de facto law in much of the Arab world, while detested by many sophisticated Westerners and Americans in particular, was actually a custom in America for many years. Under the principle, a rapist is not a rapist if he marries the girl. A seducer is not a seducer. In the Bedouin culture there is no difference between the rapist and the seducer. The reason that the practice is so hateful is that it assumes that when a woman is raped or seduced the damage is to the woman’s male relatives—to their honor. Therefore, the “crime” can be remedied by marrying the girl and satisfying the male relative’s sense of honor. Then no harm has been done, except of course to the woman who often becomes the double victim, first of the rape or seduction and then of a forced marriage. In modern America the honor of the male relatives has no standing in law, yet even today some judges and prosecutors will go easy on a statutory rapist or worse if he marries the girl and the girls family goes along with the arrangement. The term “shotgun wedding” stems from a time when family members would force the alternative on seducers.

There are over 600.000 reported rape cases in South Africa each year. Since most rape goes unreported the real total is much larger, making South Africa the worst country in the world on a sexual violence scale. There are many reasons suggested for the South African extreme. However, since apartheid was overthrown, all ANC Governments had had a reluctance to have heavy police action for anything and there is a general reluctance to imprison people as this was what the apartheid regimes did. So all criminal activity is relatively high in South Africa.

Lieber was assigned by President Lincoln to study the then international laws of war and prepare a manual for the guidance of union troops in the Civil War. Lincoln then issued the document as a general order. This statement was critical in inhibiting the South from making good on their threat to enslave any Black Union Soldier Captured and to execute any Union Black soldier who was a runaway slave from the South. Lincoln threatened to retaliate and also to hold senior Confederate officers accountable for following these rules. General Sherman and other Union Senior Officers executed a few Confederate soldiers who violated rules of the order and the “illegal” practices stopped, and with few exceptions the senior officers of both sides followed Lieber’s rules. These rules, with few modifications, governed U. S. military policies and rules through the Second World War.

What is interesting is that when he cites the dreadful facts about American slavery, he never points out that the American slave traders rarely raided the villages and captured the slaves themselves. Most often this was done my Khamenei’s Muslim brethren slave traders who dominated the slave trade in Africa. Nor does he point out what after realizing the evil that Americans perpetrated with slavery, we ended it in the 1860s. Saudi Arabia, the central nation of Islam, did not make slavery illegal until 100 years later, and even today, there are many Saudi’s who get caught practicing slavery with household servants and forms of indentured servitude. And while Christians and the Bible tolerated slavery, the Koran and the Prophet never once condemn the practice of slavery. Democracy at any point in time is not always morally right, but it is a process by which under pressure from the people it improves over time because the people can change it and do.

The President often referred to this statement as an example of his wife’s acumen. She had been born to a Southern plantation and inherited the land and the slaves. Her view, and his, were typical of the Southern point of view in early America.

Sexual abuse of female slaves was very common in the American South. See {642027} and {642028}. In the 1930s over 2,300 formerly enslaved African Americans were interviewed by members of the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal agency in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. This particular abuse was one of the most common reported. Ironically, the Southern justification for segregation and prohibition of inter-marriage even through the 1950s, was to prevent the great “crime” of miscegenation which white slave owners and their male friends committed by raping and sexually exploiting the female slaves. Today, as DNA analysis shows, most traditional Southern “white” families have recent Negroes in their ancestry.