absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the term “rape” stood as truly as for the de facto deed.
Nor was the idea of rape the only potentially treacherous undercurrent in this case. There has historically been, for American blacks, an entire complex of loaded references around the question of “naming”: slave names, masters’ names, African names, call me by my rightful name, nobody knows my name; stories, in which the specific gravity of naming locked directly into that of rape, of black men whipped for addressing white women by their given names. That, in this case, just such an inter-locking of references could work to fuel resentments and inchoate hatreds seemed clear, and it seemed equally clear that some of what ultimately occurred—the repeated references to lynchings, the identification of the defendants with the Scottsboro boys, the insistently provocative repetition of the victim’s name, the weird and self-defeating insistence that no rape had taken place and little harm been done the victim—derived momentum from this historical freight. “Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef Salaam’s mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News . “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what happened here,” the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the New York Times . “You going to arrest me now because I said the jogger’s name?” Gary Byrd asked rhetorically on his WLIB show, and was quoted by Edwin Diamond in New York magazine:
I mean, she’s obviously a public figure, and a very mysterious one, I might add. Well, it’s a funny place we live in called America, and should we be surprised that they’re up to their usual tricks? It was a trick that got us here in the first place.
This reflected one of the problems with not naming this victim: she was in fact named all the time. Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days immediately following the attack, on some local television stations. She was also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did—in Manhattan’s black-owned newspapers, the Amsterdam News and the City Sun , and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by a black partnership that included Percy Sutton and, until 1985, when he transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.
That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had been arraigned, let alone indicted. “The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes,” the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused “juveniles,” or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), “but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident.” There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether “the seriousness of the incident” might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect; one of the names released by the police and published in the Times
Nor was the idea of rape the only potentially treacherous undercurrent in this case. There has historically been, for American blacks, an entire complex of loaded references around the question of “naming”: slave names, masters’ names, African names, call me by my rightful name, nobody knows my name; stories, in which the specific gravity of naming locked directly into that of rape, of black men whipped for addressing white women by their given names. That, in this case, just such an inter-locking of references could work to fuel resentments and inchoate hatreds seemed clear, and it seemed equally clear that some of what ultimately occurred—the repeated references to lynchings, the identification of the defendants with the Scottsboro boys, the insistently provocative repetition of the victim’s name, the weird and self-defeating insistence that no rape had taken place and little harm been done the victim—derived momentum from this historical freight. “Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef Salaam’s mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News . “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what happened here,” the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the New York Times . “You going to arrest me now because I said the jogger’s name?” Gary Byrd asked rhetorically on his WLIB show, and was quoted by Edwin Diamond in New York magazine:
I mean, she’s obviously a public figure, and a very mysterious one, I might add. Well, it’s a funny place we live in called America, and should we be surprised that they’re up to their usual tricks? It was a trick that got us here in the first place.
This reflected one of the problems with not naming this victim: she was in fact named all the time. Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a paper or a television station or who followed the case for whatever professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all court records and in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days immediately following the attack, on some local television stations. She was also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what led to a damaging self-righteousness among those who did not name her and to an equally damaging embattlement among those who did—in Manhattan’s black-owned newspapers, the Amsterdam News and the City Sun , and she was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by a black partnership that included Percy Sutton and, until 1985, when he transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.
That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had been arraigned, let alone indicted. “The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes,” the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused “juveniles,” or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), “but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident.” There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether “the seriousness of the incident” might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect; one of the names released by the police and published in the Times
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