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When you speak of separation, it is your illegitimate children and their unfortunate mothers that you propose to banish from among you. The talk is idle and senseless. The attraction between both races has proved too strong for their ever being severed.… You are ashamed of it! Why? Because the great mass of the blacks—or more exactly of the browns—had no liberty, no education and no social status. But now they will enjoy, as any white man or woman, these advantages, and become your equals. Let us tell you the truth, gentlemen: you will never let them go.

Looking to the future, a Virginia freedman testified that he apprehended no greater danger of racial amalgamation now than during slavery. “It was nothing but the stringent laws of the south that kept many a white man from marrying a black woman.” He thought the strongest inclination to interracial sexual relations still rested with whites, though he would not deny the possibility that some blacks might wish to indulge themselves in what whites had already made fashionable. “I will state to you as a white lady stated to a gentleman down in Hampton, that if she felt disposed to fall in love with or marry a black man, it was nobody’s business but hers; and so I suppose that if the colored race get all their rights, and particularly their equal rights before the law, it would not hurt the nation or trouble the nation.”96

Despite white apprehensions, few blacks rushed into sexual liaisons or marital relationships with white partners. If anything, the abolition of slavery tended to diminish such contacts by freeing black women from the whims and lusts of their masters; moreover, as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina reported, “young gentlemen did not want mulatto children sworn to them at a cost of three hundred dollars apiece.” When it came to domestic relationships at least, blacks welcomed the implementation of racial separation. To the charge that they coveted the daughters and sisters of white men, Henry M. Turner replied that black men wished only to live with and love their own women without having to fear white intervention. “What do we want with their daughters and sisters? We have as much beauty as they. Look at our ladies, do you want more beauty than they? The difficulty heretofore has been, our ladies were not always at our own disposal. All we ask of the white men is to let our ladies alone, and they need not fear us.”97

No matter how carefully or eloquently blacks tried to clarify the differences between “social equality” and “public equality,” insisting that they had already suffered “social equality with a vengeance,” whites would continue to raise the bugaboo of miscegenation and to press for legislation to outlaw it. It was as though they could not trust themselves to heed their own warnings. “By his loud out-cry against the dreadful thing,” the black newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, said of the white man, “he seems to be afraid that some of his daughters may do what a good many of his sons and himself has done time and again, and therefore he wants laws made to prevent them doing so.”98 Actually, the white man’s rhetorical concern for racial purity served him well by helping to mask his own complicity in its compromise. At the same time, the obsession with miscegenation and racial supremacy proved to be effective banners around which whites could be mobilized to resist any encroachments on the traditional practices and social usages governing race relations. During the next decade, whites would be repeatedly rallied to those banners to combat the more threatening manifestations of black freedom, but in the immediate aftermath of the war they singled out for special attention the black soldier, whose continued presence most graphically symbolized their defeat and humiliation and whose behavior set the most dangerous example for their former slaves.

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WHEN ASKED TO EXPLAIN the origins of the rapist, Myrta Lockett Avary immediately thought of the black soldier. “The rapist is a product of the reconstruction period. His chrysalis