Women Perpetrators and Racial Violence During Jim Crow: Findings from the Rose Library

Lauren Ashley Bradford is a graduate student at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her dissertation, “With Blood on their Stockings: Women’s Public Participation in Racial Terror in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America”, takes a feminist comparative approach to women as perpetrators of violence in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. She centers her research around certain public settings and acts of violence, such as riots, lynchings, and pogroms. Bradford is a 2025-2026 recipient of Rose Library’s Southern History & Culture short-term fellowship.

In mid-summer of 2025, I had the incredible opportunity to spend time in the reading room at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library as a recipient of the Southern History and Culture Fellowship. During my brief tenure on Emory’s campus, I spent my days in the reading room poring over 85 archival boxes from various collections, whose contents will serve as the basis for several chapters of my doctoral dissertation. My dissertation, “‘With Blood on Their Stockings:’ Women’s Public Participation in Racial Terror in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America,” examines “Aryan” and white women’s involvement in public acts of racial violence outside their traditional roles as mothers, wives, or career professionals through a comparative study of each respective time period. While my project addresses Jim Crow as a national phenomenon and threat to Black life, the Northern and Southern states on the East Coast through to the Midwest hold the primary geographic focus of this research.

With this fellowship and the incredible assistance of the archive’s staff, I was able to cast a broad net over the sources and subjects within Rose Library’s holdings. As someone whose project encompasses both heavily documented and historically underrepresented perspectives and periods of history, having the time to thoroughly survey large collections during an archival visit has been crucial to uncovering historical threads and trends essential to the overall success of my project. The collections I consulted in the reading room—including, but not limited to, the Julian LaRose Harris papers, Kelly Miller family papers, Matt N. and Evelyn Graves Crawford papers, Ralph McGill papers, and the Langmuir African American Photographs collection—provide both foundational documentation of Jim Crow violence through newspapers, letters, meeting minutes, diary entries, journal publications, and photographs, as well as numerous unexpected contemporary connections made between American racism and Nazi persecution.

One of the first significant discoveries to emerge from the many archival boxes that made their way across my table was the Kelly Miller family papers (Manuscript Collection No. 1050). Miller, a Black academic and faculty member at Howard University from 1890 to 1934, was already making and publishing explicit comparisons between the treatment of Black people in the United States and the racialized persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.[1] Miller’s papers address lynching, mob violence, race prejudice, and the ideological foundations of Jim Crow. However, what makes Miller’s papers stand out is how they reveal the lens through which many Black scholars understood Jim Crow, not as an isolated phenomenon taking place throughout the South or U.S. as a whole, but rather as part of broader patterns of racialized violence, white supremacy, and authoritarian control. Miller saw clearly what many white Americans refused to acknowledge— that the legal structures, pseudoscientific justifications, and the spectacle of public violence during Jim Crow shared fundamental features with Nazi racial persecution. Miller and his contemporaries understood they were living through parallel systems of racialized terror—a recognition that must inform how we study these histories today.

The Matt N. and Evelyn Graves Crawford papers (Manuscript Collection No. 882) document the lives of two important twentieth-century Black activists, providing complementary perspectives on both Jim Crow violent policies and German fascism. The Crawfords’ extensive collection documents their engagement with civil rights organizing, anti-lynching activism, thoughts on antisemitism and fascism, and race relations throughout the 1940s and 1950s.[2] Like the Miller and Crawford collections, the Julian LaRose Harris papers (Manuscript Collection No. 6) and the Ralph McGill papers (Manuscript Collection No. 252) also demonstrate a clear awareness of the link between the different yet similar manifestations of racial authoritarianism in Jim Crow and Nazi Germany. Harris, an outspoken white journalist from Georgia, documented lynchings, mob violence, and Ku Klux Klan activities. With his journalism background, his papers and scrapbooks contain the descriptive and detailed documents necessary for reconstructing and analyzing several instances of women’s participation in anti-Black violence, making it one of my most critical findings.[3] McGill’s papers also provide evidence of racial violence from a white southern journalist’s perspective, with materials on lynching, segregation, the Atlanta “race riot” of 1906, and other instances of anti-Black collective violence.[4] One folder inside a box from McGill held photographs of the Nazi annexation of Austria, with crowds of Austrians cheering for Hitler as the military marched through Vienna, stacked beside images of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching—yet another instance of archival materials (literally) connecting Jim Crow racial violence with Nazi ideology and persecution. These photographs, grouped together in McGill’s files, and the several other files in his boxes covering Nazi Crimes and U.S. atrocities, suggest he, like Miller, the Crawfords, and Harris, recognized meaningful parallels between these histories.

Understanding women’s participation in racial violence requires examining the full spectrum of white women’s responses to Jim Crow terror. Several collections at the Rose Library illuminate this complex landscape, primarily within the South, revealing how women navigated, shaped, and sometimes contested the culture of racial violence in this region. The Glenn W. Rainey papers (Manuscript Collection No. 471) and Mary Cornelia Barker papers (Manuscript Collection No. 528) contain materials from the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. These organizational records reveal how some white southern women positioned themselves as opponents of lynching while carefully maintaining broader commitments to segregation and racial hierarchy. The ASWPL condemned spectacular violence while largely accepting systematic oppression—an approach that, similar to that of the mainstream women’s suffrage movement, illuminates the ideological landscape shaping white women’s relationship to racial terror.[5] Understanding this context shows how women’s participation in violence was not aberrant but rather one point on a spectrum of possible responses to Jim Crow, all occurring within a society structured by white supremacy.

The Langmuir African American Photographs collection (Manuscript Collection No. 1218) and the African American miscellany collection (Manuscript Collection No. 1032) complement these organizational records by documenting women’s physical participation in racial violence. The Langmuir collection contains photographs of lynching victims and mob violence, showing crowds of white spectators.[6] Women and children appear casually posed beside victims’ bodies, smiling for cameras, transforming murder into a public spectacle and family entertainment. The African American photograph collection (Manuscript Collection No. 958) includes similar documentation from the John William Clark lynching in Cartersville, Georgia, on October 1, 1930.[7] These visual materials demonstrate the intergenerational transmission of racial hatred and the construction of white supremacy as a communal and familial value that women actively cultivated. The casualness documented in these photographs—women in their Sunday best, children on their hip, families gathered as if at a fair—reveals that lynching was understood not as shameful violence but as legitimate community action worthy of commemoration.

The African American miscellany collection’s segregation signs, racist sheet music, and scrapbooks expose the pervasive everyday racism that existed alongside larger spectacles of violence.[8] Women participated in maintaining these systems, not only through occasional physical violence but through countless daily decisions to enforce, accept, or benefit from racial boundaries. Examining these materials together reveals the broader social context necessary for understanding women’s perpetration. This approach parallels my research on “Aryan” women in Nazi Germany, where examining both women’s participation in violence and the broader social structures that enabled it provides a more comprehensive understanding of perpetration in both contexts.

As I move forward with writing, I will return to these sources repeatedly, in an effort to situate these historical actors, actions, and spaces within broader patterns of racial violence. The women whose actions I trace through these archives—whether attacking their neighbors during pogroms or lynchings, or creating the ideological justifications for racial terror—demand serious scholarly attention, not as anomalies of gendered violence but as integral participants in systems of oppression. Understanding their participation requires acknowledging the complex realities of human behavior under racist regimes, knowledge that remains essential for dismantling contemporary manifestations of white supremacy.

The Rose Library’s collections provide the evidence necessary to tell these difficult but crucial stories. I am grateful for the opportunity this fellowship provided and look forward to continuing to work with these sources as my project develops. In the meantime, the work of uncovering these marginalized histories continues, one archival box at a time.

Images:

 

Citations:

[1] Writings by Miller, Subseries 2.1. Kelly Miller family papers, Manuscript Collection No. 1050. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; largely found in boxes 16-19.

[2] Writings, 2. Matt N. and Evelyn Graves Crawford papers, Manuscript Collection No. 882. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; largely found in boxes 3, 8, 10-17.

[3] Atlanta Constitution, 1930-1942, Subseries 3.5. Julian LaRose Harris papers, Manuscript Collection No. 6. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

[4] Photographs: Topical (Alphabetical), Subseries 10.3. Ralph McGill papers, Manuscript Collection No. 252. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; largely found in 47, 63, 92, 93.

[5] Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origin of Feminism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[6] Lynching (1-8), 1, Box: 15. Robert Langmuir African American photograph collection, Manuscript Collection No. 1218. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; also found in boxes 33 and 70.

[7] Identified photographs. African American photograph collection, Manuscript Collection No. 958. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

[8] Segregation signs, circa 1929-1939, Box: 11, Folder: 10. African American miscellany collection, Manuscript Collection No. 1032. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; also found in boxes 17 and BV9.