This molten thing about interracial sex — Ep.9

“This molten thing about interracial sex” was always at the core of fights about integration and equality, explains historian and author Dr. Timothy B. Tyson.

“The Southern Rape Complex” fueled a century of hate crimes & white dominance of our political process. But this racist lie and covenant was gradually vacated by white women, and its simmering rage now targets women in general, as well as nonwhite men.

The ritual of sexually charged political violence echoes throughout this episode as it does throughout American history, as it continues to deform our psyche and our culture. The historical roots of today’s technology-driven, crowdsourced abuse of women online — the subject of a previous episode of Wrestling Darkness — can be traced back to the waves of domestic terrorism that ended Reconstruction.

History catches up with us

Tim Tyson is a dear friend of mine. He taught me to like whisky, something I never would have expected, honestly. And, he showed me that a loving and moral man can love his culture and his country without being blind to its sins.

This episode is, on one level, two friends catching up after a period of separation caused by my six years as a family man living in Australia.

But this friend happens to have written two New York Times best-selling books, the first of which was impelled by his confusion and pain during a “late-model lynching” that took place during his childhood.

The resulting book, Blood Done Sign My Name, lured one of the vanishing ghosts of the Jim Crow Era to come out of hiding. After reading it, she summoned Tim to her home for a private confession about the most infamous hate crime in American history, the murder of Emmett Till.

Tim wasn’t planning on writing a book about the Till case. But Carolyn Bryant — the woman who accused Till of having sexually harassed and touched her at the family store — had given him the only two interviews she had granted in the five decades since Till’s death. And she had entrusted him with the pages of her unfinished memoir, which he agreed to one day furnish to the appropriate historical archive, but until then keep under wraps.

He spent the next seven years researching the case. When The Blood of Emmett Till was published in 2017, Tim was contacted by the Mississippi Attorney General and the FBI. Under subpoena, he turned over all his research materials, including the unfinished memoir for a renewed investigation, that could potentially charge Carolyn Bryant with a crime.

We discuss this during the episode, but the bulk of it is devoted to the myth of “the Black Beast Rapist” which was engineering by politicians and media moguls to incite the wave of terrorism that violently overthrew the democracies of each of the former Confederate states between 1875 and 1898 — and how this evil but ingenious narrative echoes in this, the era of Trumpism.

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Tim Tyson appears in The Headless Klansman of Selma, a short film I co-directed with Annabel Park.