There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas

There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas by Scott W. Stern is a sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South that details the racial and economic inequities of rape law and highlights the resistance of ordinary women.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was both brutal and profitable. This region, home to starving, landless farmers, produced almost 2 percent of the world's cotton. It was also the site of two rape trials that garnered national attention: one involving an accusation against two Black men, almost certainly innocent, who were sentenced to death row; and another case involving two white men, almost certainly guilty, who were also sentenced to death but faced a very different fate.

Stern braids these stories together to examine how the Jim Crow legal system selectively prosecuted rape to uphold the racial, gender, and economic hierarchies of the segregated South. Yet, Stern reveals that as much as rape law was a site of oppression, it was also an arena of fierce resistance.

Based on deep archival research, this kaleidoscopic narrative presents new information about the early career of Thurgood Marshall, who described one of the Mississippi County trials as "worse than any we have had as yet," and explores the anti-rape activism of Maya Angelou. Angelou, who came of age in Arkansas and chose to write about her own sexual assault, helped shape a burgeoning movement.