Cayton's Weekly Fighting Miscegenation Summary

“Cayton’s Weekly: Fighting Miscegenation,” published in 1920 by H.R. Cayton, is an article that details miscegenation in the 19th century. Miscegenation is interracial sex, and is something that was very common in America during the era of slavery, and was still prevalent after the civil war that freed slaves, due the belief that people of color were considered property. Many white men (predominately in the south) still had beliefs that they could do as they pleased with the bodies of African American women during the 19th century. During this era, many Caucasian men had interracial sex with newly freed African American women, regardless of how they felt. Because of this, it led to the creation of a whole class of mulattoes, or biracial people. However, despite this, white men forbade white women from doing the same thing, and expected them …show more content…
Throughout this era, women were expected to be passionless, or not to have sexual desires. Women that were found to have sexual desires were often looked at as whores. In Cayton’s article, it asks why white women are not infatuated with black men. The answer is that if a white woman were found to be with a black man, there would be horrible consequences. In one instance of a white woman and a black man being caught in a relationship, the Ku Klux Klan, a group of white extremists who terrorized people of color, got involved. In this situation, the black man’s penis was nailed to a block of wood while a ring of fire surrounded him. The man was then handed a large knife and was told two things: to either cut his own penis off or to be burned alive (Stallings). The man cut his own penis off and ran away (Stallings). The woman’s punishment involved cutting two holes into her labia, and putting a padlock through and locking it (Stallings). The men threw away the key and let the woman go (Stallings). Stories like this one made a lot of white women fear having interracial