The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment.

• Author: Holden-Smith, Barbara

The execution of black men for allegedly raping white women is a defining characteristic of the history of race relations in the South. In the years between the Civil War and the early 1930s, these executions often took the form of extra-legal lynchings in which black men were burned, shot, or hung by mobs of whites.(1) Lynching served primarily as a means to control black people in a white supremacist culture. However, Southern apologists for lynching argued that the mob acted in order to protect the virtue of white Southern womanhood from black men who were incapable of controlling their desire for white women.(2) Thus, beyond functioning as a justification for lynching, the mythical black rapist also served to create an atmosphere of danger and menace in which the white Southern woman was kept in a role of vulnerability and weakness in the patriarchal South.(3) Lynching, though, began to die out as a primary means of social control around 1930.(4)

But the demise of lynching did not end the Southern practice of executing blacks accused of raping white women. The electric chair and the gas chamber of the criminal justice system replaced the rope and faggot of the mob. Yet death at the hands of the state proved no more just than had death by the lynch mob. The trials of black men accused of raping white women were all too often mere "legal lynchings"--resulting sometimes from false charges and conducted in a manner that merely gave a passing nod to the procedural incidents of due process.(5) And the number of legal executions rivaled the number of lynchings. Between 1930 and the early 1970s, the Southern states executed 405 black men convicted of rape.(6) In the wake of the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, striking down all then-prevailing death penalty laws, most of the states that had previously punished rape as a capital offense declined to include rape among the offenses eligible for the death penalty under laws designed to meet Furman's requirements.(7) The last hold-out was Georgia, whose statute making rape a capital offense was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1977 in Coker v. Georgia(8) as a violation of the Eight Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Since then, no one has been sentenced to death for rape.

In The Martinsville Seven, Eric Rise, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware, tells the story of the legal proceedings that culminated in the execution of a group of young black men accused of having raped a white woman in Martinsville, Virginia.(9) All seven men died in Virginia's electric chair in the first week of February, 1951. The case of the Martinsville Seven is unique in the annals of the death penalty because the seven executions were the largest number ever for a single instance of rape. Indeed, no reported lynching incident involved a larger number of black men put to death for raping a white woman.(10)

The case is also a significant landmark in the history of the legal struggle to combat the racism that infects the American criminal justice system, for it was the first case in which lawyers used statistical evidence to attack the death penalty on equal protection grounds.(11) That attack proved unsuccessful in the Martinsville case, as the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals rejected it on review and the Governor of Virginia found it an insufficient reason to grant clemency.(12) The United States Supreme Court likewise rejected the defendants' petitions for certiorari, which were also premised on statistical proof of racial disparity in capital sentencing for rape in Virginia.(13) In fact, the Supreme Court did not directly consider the question of the use of statistics to prove racial discrimination in capital sentencing until thirty-six years later in McCleskey v. Kemp.(14) There the Court held that the individual defendant had to prove racial discrimination in his own case in order to make out an equal protection violation, even though the statistical evidence, the Court assumed, proved racial disparity in Georgia's decisions on whom to put to death.

Professor Rise's account of the Martinsville affair thoroughly describes the factual background of the case and the legal proceedings leading up to the convictions and executions. He also examines the place of this case in the history of Southern justice and race. In doing so, Professor Rise presents the interesting thesis that, because these trials comported with the legal requirements for a fair trial, the convictions and sentencing of these seven men were atypical of the Southern justice that had usually been meted out to blacks accused of crimes against whites. Professor Rise's thesis is flawed, however, because he fails to recognize that a trial of seven black men accused of having gang raped a white woman could have but one outcome in the South of the 1940s, regardless of the procedures used or the guilt or innocence of the accused. Professor Rise downplays far too much the racial subtext that underlies most Southern stories about the conviction of a black man accused of having raped a white woman. Thus, he fails to acknowledge that the Martinsville affair is part of a long history of unequal justice in cases of blacks accused of crimes against whites, especially where the crime is rape.

The other subtext that Professor Rise largely ignores is the story of the need to achieve justice for the alleged victim of the rape. I found myself torn between these two stories--that of justice for the victim and that of justice for the black men accused of having raped her. The conflict between justice for the alleged victim and justice for her accused attackers is an important underlying issue in the Martinsville story, but one that Professor Rise does not address. In Part I of this review, I will discuss and critique Professor Rise's treatment of the Martinsville case. Then in Part II, I will briefly discuss my own views about the race and gender dimensions of cases like the Martinsville affair.

1. Professor Rise's Account

   The thesis of Professor Rise's study is that, contrary to the "stereotypical view of southern justice,"(15) the death of the Martinsville defendants at the hands of the state cannot be explained by racism alone.(16) According to Professor Rise, the seven defendants received procedurally fair trials, free of the lynch mob atmosphere and of hysterical prosecutorial appeals to the necessity of protecting the virtue of white women that characterized the typical Southern trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Moreover, he argues, the evidence at trial clearly proved that the victim had indeed been raped and that all seven defendants were present at the scene. Thus, this case was not a "legal lynching," but rather a case in which the criminal justice system followed procedures comporting with due process.(17) In Professor Rise's view, other values beyond enforcing white supremacy account for the convictions and failed appeals in this case. Those values, he argues, are due process, crime control, community stability, judicial restraint, and domestic security. Using the transcripts, briefs and other legal documents filed in the Martinsville trials and appeals as his primary sources, Professor Rise extensively examines the legal proceedings in an attempt to show that each of these values contributed to the state's decision to sentence the seven black men to death and to carry out their executions.(18)

   The victim of the rape recounted in The Martinsville...