Part Two: Rebecca Felton: The First Female Senator (was also a pro-lynching activist)

After the Civil War takes everything from her, Rebecca blames her woes on rich white planters, which weirdly causes her to become a pro-lynching activist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're currently listening to about our first female senator, technically Rebecca Felton, who, when we ended part one, just did the whole Scarlett O'Hara thing, standing in the ruins of her, the home that she loved, right? We, we actually have a little bit more of the war years to talk about here. But we'll, we'll, we'll get through all of that. But first, our guest Samantha McFay. Sam, you want to plug your pluggables up at the top?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I am the host, one of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You, also part of the iHeart network. We have a book, Stuff I've Never Told You. We have an account on Instagram and Blue Sky. I believe it says Mom Stuff.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Unlike what the title says, we don't talk about moms or mom stuff.

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  That's good.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Just so you know.

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  It's not my strong suit either.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:56Robert Evans?

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• 2:03Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 2:19Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 2:24Speaker 05

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 2:45Speaker 07

  Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:17Robert Evans?

  So yeah, let's, uh, let's, let's get into the Civil War, right? Uh, anyway, the war years initially spared the first Felton plantation, right? It quickly, though, turned out that the flower of Southern manhood was somewhat less suited to warfare than they had anticipated. And so in short order, the Feltons were ripping up their fine clothing and carpets to make uniforms and cold weather gear. Eventually, they fled ahead of the Union Army to a shack near Macon. Rebecca later wrote this of her feelings upon leaving the home that she had built and buried the first of her children at. "When I reached the gate, I picked up the springs that had been a part of my dead child's fine baby carriage, also the arm of a large parlor mahogany chair that had also been burned. Desolation and destruction everywhere. Bitter grinding poverty, poverty, slaves all gone, money also.

• 4:01Robert Evans?

  We certainly paid the price while we were in refugee condition." Right? So very soon, she loses almost everything. The slaves aren't actually gone. She leaves behind like 15 of them to manage her, her, her farm and, uh, Decatur. But they're not going to have like a lot of people around them past this point for the war years. They're kind of like actually now living like poor people, right? The, the, their, their, their circumstances changed immediately, right? As did a lot of very wealthy families.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so this reminds me of the scene with Scarlett O'Hara going, "I'll never go hungry again."

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I know way too much about this book and movie.

• 4:36Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. We haven't had yet hit that point, but we will, we will soon. So the fact that they've moved to Macon does not protect them. The war brings disease, which hits the Felton family like a machine gun. After the fall of Atlanta, a measles epidemic ravages the state, and it kills her five-year-old son and six of the people that she still owned. Not long after, their farm was ransacked by Confederate soldiers fleeing their defeat at the hands of General Sherman. Rebecca was enraged. She saw this as evidence of the mass failure of Southern manhood. Warriors who had been so boastful before now looting their own people as they fled in despair. And as this is happening, there's a, a terrible fear building among elite white women of rape, right? At the hands of Union soldiers, at the hands of Confederate soldiers, and at

• 5:19Robert Evans?

  the hands of newly freed or escaped slaves, right? There's a lot of the, and these panic are being stalked by the Confederate media, who's saying that like, well, if, if the lines fail, if the Union gets here, here's what'll happen to all your women, right? They are being told that, too. This isn't just something that they're making up. Now, late in the war, Union soldiers occupy and raid Rebecca's Macon property. And while the Feltons get by without being subjected to any physical harm themselves, not all of the people on the farm are so lucky. If you ask a body of soldiers to occupy an enemy farm, or town, or whatever, some of them are going to rape the civilians there. No military in history has ever occupied a defeated enemy and avoided this.

• 6:01Robert Evans?

  In fact, US soldiers on bases in Japan today commit rape on locals regularly enough that it is a well-known type of news item in Okinawa, right? This happens like every year up there, sometimes more than once a year.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Like South Korea, too.

• 6:15Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, yeah, South Korea. It's why, it's again, be real careful when you put soldiers places, because this happens. This is, this is just a, a side effect. Now, this whole of Southern womanhood recoiled at stories of wealthy plantation ladies being raped by white or black soldiers, with stories, true and false, of the latter spreading particularly rapidly. In late 1863, as Union soldiers neared Cartersville, Confederate propaganda warned civilians about widespread atrocities, particularly those that would surely be committed by black soldiers. Rebecca wrote, "The conduct of the enemy has been destitute of that forbearance and magnanimity which civilization and Christianity have introduced. Clothing of women and infants is stripped from their persons. Helpless women have been exposed to the most cruel outrages and to that dishonor, which is infinitely worse than death."

• 7:00Robert Evans?

  That's how she's referring to rape, is it's worse than death. It's like worse than murder, because that's your only valuable asset as a woman.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Right. Obviously, it's okay when it happens to the enslaved, but oh my God.

• 7:11Robert Evans?

  It's not okay, but it's very different.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  White women.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this is before she'd even had a lot of real contact with enemy soldiers, certainly before her farm was plundered. So we can see this is her mostly repeating things other people had told her. And again, when she's actually captured and actually exposed to the Union Army, she's never harmed herself, but she is forced to stand by while Union troops rape some of the women that she had previously owned. They do that, right? Now, here's the, here's a reality we don't talk about at the end of the Civil War often enough, which is that there were a ton of rapes by Union soldiers. The reality is that the vast majority of the women in the Confederacy who were raped after the war were black. Rich white women still enjoyed higher status than formerly enslaved black women.

• 7:55Robert Evans?

  And even General Sherman made occasional efforts to protect specific Southern ladies he knew and admired. Meanwhile, newly freed black women rarely enjoyed powerful patrons. However, they did take advantage of one benefit that was new to them, the right to press charges against their assailants. Now, that doesn't sound like much to modern ears when we're talking about a bunch of women who have been raped by soldiers in a fucking war zone necessarily, right? That maybe not sound like much consolation. And we all know how flawed the legal system is and how particularly bad it is at gaining justice today for rape victims. But you have to remember something, which is that prior to emancipation, there was no law at all that said these women had a right to say no. So there is something important in the horror of all of these post-war rapes,

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  because this cannot have been the first time many of those women were raped. Rebecca herself writes about how common it was for white masters to do that. But it was the first time any of these women had the ability to report their rape to someone and actually see the rapist punished. And as is always the case, we must assume that the majority, almost surely the vast majority of such rapes, went unreported and thus unpunished. But by this end of the Civil War, more than 400 Union soldiers had been court martialed after committing sexual crimes. Their victims included both white and black women, and both women and girls, and the youngest was five. I want to quote now, yeah. I want to quote now from an article in the European Journal of American Studies by Susan Barber and Charles Ritter.

• 9:24Robert Evans?

  "Procedurally, union judge advocates, the men who prosecuted cases before the courts martial, were instructed to follow the law in the state where the crime took place. Since most of the crimes occurred in southern territory, this meant that black women could be prohibited from bringing sexual assault charges against a white assailant and barred from testifying against him in court, since this was the law in all southern states. However, US court martial panels never prevented blacks from testifying against whites or blacks on the basis of race, thus giving black women, for the first time, a legal voice with which to accuse white men of sexual violation. This was an extremely progressive policy to establish, and it was sanctioned at the highest levels of the United States government." And this is another really interesting story that we don't tell enough. In her book, Southern Horror, Crystal Feimster relates the story of Lieutenant Andrew Smith

• 10:08Robert Evans?

  of the 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry, who raped a young black girl. General Benjamin Butler, who read the verdict when he went to court, summarized the case with an admirable degree of rage. "A female Negro child quits slavery and comes into the protection of the federal government, and upon first reaching the limits of the federal lines, receives the brutal treatment from an officer, himself a husband and a father, a violation of her person." He sentenced Smith to 10 years hard labor and said the man was lucky not to be executed. After Macon was captured, the war was over for the Feltons. Rebecca declared, "I can run no further. I have nowhere to go." The people she and her husband owned counted for most of her property, and without them, she was nearly broke, with just enough props left in the field to survive the winter.

• 10:51Robert Evans?

  Southern defeat had been so total, so humbling, that Rebecca reacted to it in an undeniably appropriate way, by blaming all of the men in her society. And it was totally her fault. Southern women didn't vote. Like, say what you will about how morally complicit they are. They didn't have a choice in the secession, really.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Right, right. She knew all along, she said.

• 11:11Robert Evans?

  She, yeah, and the way Rebecca saw it, they'd broken the social contract. I want to quote from a piece in the Smithsonian Magazine by Laura Maloney. "According to historian Leanne White's, Felton believed upper-class women had kept their end of the antebellum gender bargain by minding their place in society while their husbands had broken theirs. By refusing to compromise on slavery and engineering secession, these men had triggered a series of events that would forever undermine their ability to offer protection to their dependents, rights, whites, and gender matters, civil war, reconstruction, and the making of the new South. As a result, elite women were exposed to forces that had long molded the lives of most southern women, a change in fortune Felton was eager to reverse." And, yeah, I think that's a really fascinating way to look at it.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  For her, like, kind of running into some of the right ideas for the completely wrong reason.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Robert Evans?

  In her own book, Feimster points out something I think is worth adding. "Southern men, especially the planter elite, Felton argued, had put the profit of slavery before the protection of southern womanhood, whereas elite white women had held up their end to the bargain, to the point of unsexing themselves. Southern manhood had failed miserably. White women all over the South had been left unprotected, and some had even suffered rape." And when she talks about unsexing themselves, once the men go away, the women running these plantations start carrying guns and weapons. They're not supposed to. They think it's gross. It's uncomfortable to them. They're unsexing themselves, and we did it to help the war effort, and you still couldn't beat the fucking North?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  We did our part, and you failed? How dare you?

• 12:40Robert Evans?

  And a bunch of us got raped, right? That's, that is this, this rage is going to, is going to, like, directly fuel a big chunk of the post-Reconstruction lynching epidemic. This is where a lot of it starts, and a lot of these, like, rich white women and these men who feel also really angry and furious at themselves for not having been able to stop it, and not at themselves, they blame a specific group of people.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 13:02Robert Evans?

  But a lot of anger is building here, and that's really, that's going to get let out very soon. "Immediately after the South lost and the Civil War ended, a wave of malaria hit Georgia, and it touched the Felton family particularly hard. It killed the last of her five born children, leaving her with only a stepdaughter and her husband. She was 30 years old, so at age 30, she has had five children, and they have all died. She has lost her houses, all of her money. Things are not well. She is pissed."

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Oliver Peoples, okay, Oliver, all right.

• 13:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, and her husband, you know, goes back to work after the war. She has to get a job after the war, and they slowly struggle to rebuild their lives. And as she is, like, working and finding ways to make money for the first time and try helping to support her family, she gets angrier and angrier at these planters who had thrown not just their wealth, but their children, her children, away for nothing. Right? They didn't just throw away the slaves and the money in the houses. They threw away her kids, as she sees it, right? And she's not wrong to see it that way. "Despite the dire circumstances after the war, the Feltons slowly but surely began to thrive in the newly reunited States. In 1784, William Felton ran for Congress and was elected as a Democrat. He would be re-elected twice. His constituents were the small farmers he called neighbor,

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  and his campaign manager was Rebecca Felton. Her hatred of southern elite men did not extend to her husband, who had, like her, thought the war a terrible idea, and who genuinely respected her ideas, right?"

• 14:28Speaker 02

  That's amazing. She's like, hey, fuck white men, but not my husband.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Not all men.

• 14:35Robert Evans?

  Not my husband.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  It's not all men, Sophie.

• 14:37Robert Evans?

  No, it's not all men. No, she, because she has a good relationship with her husband, and I think he respects her mind. Like, he lets her do stuff.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  He lets her keep her opinions.

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he lets her, and they become kind of a power couple after this, right? Rebecca and William kind of defy the odds and seem to have been a perfect, this might be the most functional relationship we've ever covered on Behind the Bastards.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  They support each other. We love a good supportive couple.

• 15:00Robert Evans?

  They really do. Rebecca travels with her husband to DC and acts as his secretary. She also writes his speeches for him, and over time, she gets to consult and help draft actual legislation. So she's actually helping to write laws, because she's, her husband's in Congress. "She grows more and more confident over the years in the idea that women ought to be able to have a say in the affairs of the nation, and her involvement did not go unnoticed, per the Smithsonian Magazine. After William won his third campaign, one newspaper announced, "Mrs. Felton and Doctor reappointed." So they're doing that founder of Reddit and Serena Williams thing or whatever?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Mr. Felton, Mrs. Felton and Doctor re-elected.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like it.

• 15:45Robert Evans?

  "William's opponents attacked his wife's involvement after she appeared in 1876 rally, and editor dubbed her attendance 'a disgusting spectacle.' Her promotion of a prison reform bill in 1887 caused one legislator to christen her 'the political she of Georgia,' a reference to the sorceress queen who dominates men in H. Ryder Haggard's 1886 novel, She. Misogyny haunted her even in death. In his 1960 biography of Felton, historian John Talmadge described her as 'a belligerent feminist,' though he admitted he wouldn't dare to write a word about her if she were still living."

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Oh, you what?

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  You gotta respect that.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Look, that's iconic.

• 16:22Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't talk shit if she was still alive, though.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  She scares me.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Belligerent feminist, hot.

• 16:29Robert Evans?

  Belligerent feminist.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Hot, right? You know what?

• 16:33Robert Evans?

  It's not going to be quite as hot as you're thinking.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. She sucks. She sucks.

• 16:39Robert Evans?

  Parts of it are going to be good. Parts of it are going to be good.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  But being scary.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  But women be scary?

• 16:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She's undeniably got some mojo. So the whole time her husband's in Congress, William was engaging with American politics and culture pretty much the only way a woman could while still maintaining any degree of agency. She wrote, "If you wanted to influence the culture, that was your way as a woman in this period of time." You know, books, fiction, letters in magazine articles, whatnot. She puts out hundreds and hundreds of letters to the editor and articles in magazines. She's, she's writing every day, columns on the issues of the day, and just sending them off. And she attracts a fan base and launches a newspaper with her husband. After William loses his fourth reelection campaign, Rebecca joins the Women's Christian Temperance Union and starts campaigning on her own for prohibition.

• 17:28Robert Evans?

  She'd made the choice not to become a drinker as a girl, perhaps spurred on by scary memories of drunken southern men. She saw prohibition, like many did, as a way to protect women, and women of all races, right? Drunkenness is the enemy of women, because all these men are getting hammered at bars, and they're coming back, and they're beating the shit out of us and doing other terrible things. They're not able to work. They're not able to take care of their families. That's the attitude of a lot of these prohibitionists. And Felton is a prohibitionist because she sees alcohol as harming women, right?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  I'm seeing a lot of parallels between this power couple and, like, Meatball Ron, Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey. Because, yeah, because, like, you know, Casey was such a big part of his campaign and part of his career, and she was like an ex-journalist.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  It's really interesting.

• 18:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you get, you get these power, and she, this is kind of going in the reverse direction, where once his political career fades out, Rebecca gets more famous, actually, right?

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  So she's, you know, getting to be an activist. She likes her early activism in favor of prohibition. She enjoys organizing people. She's good at it. So she finds another issue to fight for, and decides she's going to become an activist pushing for reform of Georgia's convict leasing system. Now, thankfully, this is not around still, but it existed much longer than it should have. "Georgia's convict leasing system was a particularly hideous bit of post-war fuckery by rich whites. In order to replace lost slave labor without paying, Georgians pioneered using prison labor to recreate the good old days." From the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Some Georgians saw the prisoners at the state's penitentiary in Milledgeville as the solution to their problems, a workforce that could be formally controlled.

• 19:09Robert Evans?

  Georgia leaders were also concerned about costs associated with operating a penitentiary as the prison population increased and included many more African-Americans. In an effort to resolve these issues, officials during Reconstruction 1867 to 76 approved the leasing of prisoners to private citizens." Of course, and so, like, this is just slavery with extra steps, right?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it's kind of still happening today.

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  We do have a version of this today.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  The amount of labor that comes from prison, yeah.

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this was just even more direct, where you're just, you're just renting them. Like, you're just getting handed these people who have to work for you. "And the old evils reasserted themselves at once. Although it was agreed that the convicts would be treated humanely, reports to then-Governor Rufus Bullock indicated that least convicts were being overworked, brutally whipped, and killed." So that's great.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  So I'm assuming this leads to the chain gang type of narrative.

• 20:00Robert Evans?

  This, yes, chain gangs are a descendant from this. Yes. And the reason why the convict leasing system comes to an end and it gets replaced by the chain gang system has a lot to do with Rebecca Felton. Because this system is such an abomination, Rebecca was correct to battle against it. Felton had once considered slavery justified by God, and she was still a huge racist. So perhaps she fought so hard against this system, not because it was right to do so, but because she hated the rich, white planters that benefited from it more than anything, even more than she was racist. I kind of wonder that. Like, is this, was it all that this is unjust, or was it just that, like, no, fuck you guys? Like, I lost everything. You don't get to sneak your way into having it back.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  How dare you start over and do that again?

• 20:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. How dare you fucking try again? After all you put my family and I through? Absolutely not. Yeah. I, maybe I'm not giving Rebecca enough credit here, but I have to kind of wonder how much of this case that was. And you know what else I have to wonder, Samantha?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  What?

• 20:59Robert Evans?

  Whether or not the products and services that support this podcast are involved in human trafficking.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Robert.

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  No way to know.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit, gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

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  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 22:24Speaker 06

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 22:36Speaker 05

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• 22:48Speaker 07

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 23:03Speaker 04

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  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:48Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Rebecca's becoming a big activist now. She's trying to get rid of this convict leasing system. She galvanizes the Women's Christian Temperance Union against this horror, and she whips up support via petitions and articles. She gets thousands of women engaged, involved in protesting this, and she applies all of her political connections and plays a central role in launching a crusade to abolish convict leasing. Now, the end doesn't come rapidly, but as time goes on, a mix of changing economic conditions and relentless media attention by Rebecca and other activists builds support for legislation that gets, that abolishes convict leasing in 1908. Right? And obviously, again, the chain gang system kind of proceeds from this, you know?

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  And there's an argument that they really mostly stopped because it wasn't economically viable anymore. But we'll give, we'll give Felton like a qualified thumbs up for that piece of activism, right? It's still the right fight. Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, it was helpful, but for why? Why?

• 24:48Robert Evans?

  And it would also prove to be her last entirely good turn. On August 11th, 1897, Rebecca gave a speech in Savannah on the struggles poor white women faced on farms. These included rape, she insisted, and pointed out that just last week, three black men had been lynched after being accused of rape. This had become increasingly common after the war as a reaction to the freedom of black men and fears of violation that had rooted in the South since the war's end. Rebecca traced lynching back to slavery, and she was right on that. But she also saw lynching as justified because she viewed black male rapists as a plague. Now, in 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett had published an investigation into lynching called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Wells points out

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  that less than a third of lynching victims were ever actually accused of rape, regardless of what the mob said. Most lynchings were complete farces of justice, often carried on with economic motivations. And this is a long quote from Ida B. Wells, but I think it's really worth reading. And this is her kind of making the case against lynching making any sort of sense. On March 9th, 1892, there were lynched in this same city, and she's talking about Memphis, three of the best specimens of young, since the war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic businessmen. They believed the problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man named Barrett had one on the opposite corner. After a personal difficulty, which Barrett sought by going into the people's grocery, drawing out a

• 26:17Robert Evans?

  pistol, and was thrashed by Calvin McDowell, he, Barrett, threatened to clean them out. These men were a mile beyond the city limits and police protection. Hearing that Barrett's crowd was coming back to attack them Saturday night, they mustered forces and prepared to defend themselves against the attack. When Barrett came, he led a posse of officers, 12 in number, who afterwards claimed to be hunting a man for whom they had a warrant. That 12 in citizens' clothes should, should think it was necessary to go into the night to hunt one man who had never before been arrested or made any record as a criminal has never been explained. When they entered the back door, the young men thought the threatened attack was on and fired into them. Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending party found it was officers of the law upon which they had fired, they ceased and got away. 31 men were jailed and thrown in jail as conspirators, although

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  they were all declared more than once that they did not know they were firing on officers. Excitement was at a feverbeat until the morning papers, two days later, announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out of danger. This hindered, rather than helped the plans of the whites. There was no law on the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the unwritten law did. Three of these men, the president, the manager, and clerk of the grocery, the leaders of the conspiracy, were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly brutal manner. The Negroes are getting too independent, they say. We must teach them a lesson. Right? And that, Ida B. Wells is pointing out, the real motivation for lynching isn't, there's all these crimes that have to be stopped, white women are in danger. No, it's some guy wants something a black man has, or a black family has. And just screaming rape

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  and then murdering them, or dragging them out of a jail and murdering them, way easier than anything else, right? By far, the best move to go to, you know? That's what this is all about. Rebecca Felton doesn't agree with that, though. She thinks she knows what better than Ida B. Wells, because Rebecca is terrified constantly of being assaulted, like many women of her station, because they've got fucking PTSD, both from being assaulted and from having to have armed themselves during the war and constantly live in fear of being raped or violated, right? This is part of why rape worked so well as an excuse for lynch mobs. Confederate propaganda had drilled people's heads full of stories of free black Union soldiers committing wanton rape. In places like Memphis and Macon, no

• 28:27Robert Evans?

  woman like Rebecca would doubt a cry of rape aimed at a free black man. As that piece in The Smithsonian explains it, Felton blamed the lynchings on Democratic politicians who plied black men with liquor at the polls, as well as on the failure of religion and the courts to prevent crime and deliver justice. If white men couldn't protect women's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, Felton said, then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary. That is the key Rebecca quote.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  A week.

• 28:54Robert Evans?

  Yep. Because white men are not protecting us from being raped, and we're mostly being raped by white men, we need to have lynch mobs go out and kill these people. That's where she lines on. And you can see how her previous life led her here, right?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  So is she assuming, like, she's just ignoring the fact that a chunk of the PTSD came from white men? Like, I know she's mad at them, so she's just lashing out at who she can go.

• 29:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  So she just has to lash out at men?

• 29:24Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And she knows she's not going to blame it against white men, so might as well do this.

• 29:29Robert Evans?

  And she's angry at all of them, but only one type of man is going to face lethal consequences for her anger. So Rebecca, she's cool. Oh, she's so cool with it. Now, when Rebecca had railed against drunkenness and spousal violence and convict leasing and argued in favor of the vote for women, she had attracted a following. As a pro lynching advocate, she drew an even more dedicated following, because feeding fear and anger is one of the fastest ways to get famous, especially if the fear you stir is against a subject your society already despises.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  It's just like, a pro lynching advocate is such an insane thing to be. That is...

• 30:08Speaker 01

  What?

• 30:09Robert Evans?

  Lynch, Lynch forever. That's the Rebecca Felton attitude.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Thousand a week.

• 30:14Robert Evans?

  So this all comes to a terrible head in 1898 in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington was one of those communities where after the war, black people had been enormously successful in creating businesses and jobs for themselves, right? Think about Black Wall Street in, in, uh, somewhere in Oklahoma. Um, since Wilmington was mostly black and they could vote now, they also started getting elected to local government and came to dominate it, in fact, which enraged some of the white citizens. So, most people in this town are black. They're starting to organize and they're starting to win election and take over local government because they make up the majority of people. Now, they are not hostile to the white community and not all of the white community is hostile to them. In fact, there's

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  a chunk that they're organizing with because the black community in Wilmington has no beef with their neighbors. In fact, white and black working class populists in Wilmington had created a new political movement that they called Fusion, right? It's one of those fascinating, really hopeful stories in the post-war period that has a tragic end, but the Fusion movement in Wilmington is a really interesting case. And I want to quote from an article in Humanities, the magazine for the National Endowment for the Humanities, by Janine Lattis in 2025. Here's how she explains the Fusion movement. "White populists and black and white Republicans formed joint electoral tickets on shared priorities. Black men served on the Board of Aldermen as city treasurer, city jailer, and city coroner.

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  Ten of Wilmington's 26 police were black." So they're not just because most people in town are black, taking up all of the, winning most of the elections. They built an electoral compromise with poor whites and they are getting elected based on shared priorities, right? It's, it's exactly what politics ought to be, you know?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  So did they call it Fusion? Cause that's like, essentially like contemporary word to me. That's interesting.

• 32:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the term that a lattice uses for, and that's the only term I've, I've heard used for it. So I have to assume you can hear some like writing about it. I think that's just like, yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 32:14Robert Evans?

  They didn't, wouldn't have meant it in the nuclear sense, obviously.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 32:18Robert Evans?

  And it, it's a fucking amazing story, right? Uh, but obviously because this is a reconstruction era story, we also know it's going to end badly. And Rebecca's a big part of why. But the short story is that while things are going pretty well for most people there, there's a bunch of rich and formerly rich white men who were like, wait a second, I have to listen to a black man now? We don't have all the power. Let's do a coup d'etat, right? Let's coup this out. So they start practicing to form mobs with the goal of forcing black officials out of office and making anyone with any wealth and power leave, uh, in order to break the black community's back so that they can rule the ashes. They start doing this in the summer of 1898. The inciting incident is a speech

• 33:00Robert Evans?

  that Rebecca Felton gives earlier that year in which she attacks white men for failing to stop, quote, "the black beast rapist." She expressly argues that lynching is necessary to protect white women, and it was up to those failed white men to found their courage and do it. If it needs lynching to protect women's dispossession from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynch, right? This is, this is where that comes from. Now, her words are reprinted, as they often were, all over white supremacist newspapers that had started popping up in Wilmington. To fight back, Alex Manley, the editor of the city's most influential black paper, The Daily Record, published an article and wrote, "The black beast rapist? You mean all the white people raping black women?" Basically, like, that's a big part of his article. Is that like, you're talking about like rapists, like y'all,

• 33:42Robert Evans?

  like the rape is coming from one direction here, right? You're the real rapist. Right? Like, that's, that, that's kind of Manley's starting point. But he also addresses Felton directly, quote, "A Felton from Georgia makes a speech before the Agricultural Society at Tybee, Georgia, in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure. This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood, and if the alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent as his oftentimes reported, her plea would be worthy of consideration. Mrs. Felton begins well, for she admits that education will better protect the girls on the farm from the assaulter. This we admit, and it should not be confined to the white any more than to the colored girls. The papers are also filled often with reports of rapes of white women and subsequent lynchings of the alleged rapists. The editors pour volumes of aspersions against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers

• 34:27Robert Evans?

  of the other race would condemn the condition of crime because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would root out the evil of both races." So Manley is saying, hey, instead of just like blaming us for all of this, we know you're doing the most of the rape of like your woman. What if we all get together as a community to stop all of the rapists in our mix, you know, white and black? Cause it, cause rape's just like a problem that we have as a society and we should deal with it together?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:57Robert Evans?

  He's a very reasonable guy, this Manley. This drives people insane. Among other things, he's just said that like, hey, it's fine if white and black people have sex and it's not rape. And he's also saying that like, what if we work together to fix this problem that is clearly something we both have? That is all so offensive to these white supremacists.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. He already said all the things. To work with? How dare you?

• 35:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. How fucking dare you? Yeah. Uh, so this drives people crazy. As Janine Lattis writes, "His editorial was reprinted throughout the South, further enraging the white elite with threats against, and threats against Manley's life poured in. All that summer, Rebecca Felton continued to beat the drum about the necessity of lynching to protect white women from black rapists. She gave speech after speech and wrote her customary blizzard of articles, contributed to an already feverish pace of white supremacist press on the same subject." So the business leaders, the white leaders of Wilmington had their own paper, News and Observer, which they used to print a bunch of white supremacist propaganda. They also started buying up and hoarding a shitload of guns. They started making calls to burn barns. They started bringing in racists from surrounding states, particularly a bunch

• 36:02Robert Evans?

  of racists from South Carolina who called themselves red shirts. Uh, these guys would pull black men out of their homes, torture them, threaten to kill them, do anything they could to stop them from voting and basically say, hey, you need to get the fuck out of town if you want to be safe. On November 7th, at the county courthouse, Confederate Civil War veteran Alfred Moore Waddell gave an incendiary speech. "Men, the crisis is upon us. You must do your duty. The city, country, and state shall be rid of Negro domination once and forever. You are the sons of noble ancestry. You are Anglo Saxons. Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find a Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. And if he refuses, kill him. Shoot him down in his tracks."

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  So, cool.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 36:44Robert Evans?

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• 37:24Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 38:10Speaker 06

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:29Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 38:33Speaker 07

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 38:49Speaker 07

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• 38:57Speaker 04

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• 38:59Speaker 07

  I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 39:13Speaker 07

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 39:27Speaker 04

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:34Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So on election day, red-shirted mobs roared through the town of Wilmington, threatening black men and tossing out ballots, destroying ballot drops. They also burnt down businesses, including Manley's newspaper. They like burnt that whole newspaper office down, and they beat and shot and murdered dozens. After the election went their way, because no other votes were countered, they issued a white Declaration of Independence and announced that they would never be ruled by black men again. And unfortunately, the Wilmington coup has a longstanding effect. Before the coup, Wilmington was 56% black. Today, it's something like 15% black. Newspapers referred to it as a black uprising or riot

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  until the 1950s, and the death toll is generally cited between 60 and 300. We will never know for sure, right? This is a nightmare, the loss of so much wealth and community. It's one of the things that's still affecting people to this day is the destruction. And this isn't the only town that gets destroyed like this by racists.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  60 and 300 is such a wide range.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, they're not keeping note of how many they're killing, right? That's not their business. Yeah. So Felton herself celebrated the massacre afterwards, telling a journalist, "The slanderer, Manley, should be made to fear a reaper's rope rather than occupy a place in New York skyscrapers." Basically, that guy shouldn't have gotten away. We should have hung him, you know? If he ever comes down here again, make sure you do that. She kept on advocating for lynching for years, although in time it became, it grew obvious that even her lynching didn't do anything to stop white women from being raped. She never apologized. She just kept advocating for the vote for white women. In fact, as the cause of suffrage grew more popular in the early 1900s, she argued that

• 41:21Robert Evans?

  white men should support suffrage so that white women could use their vote to maintain white power and supremacy. William died, her husband, in 1909, but Rebecca kept going. By 1922, she was a very old woman and very widely respected in Georgia politics. Women had the vote now, and Rebecca started insisting that the first female elected leaders were inevitable, if not something she expected to see. Then 1922 comes along, right? And this is going to be like a, this moment of kismet for Rebecca. The junior senator from Georgia, who's going to be running in that election, gets sick and dies very suddenly. And the governor, Thomas Hardwick, has to appoint a replacement until there can be

• 42:04Robert Evans?

  an election. And since Hardwick is going to run in that election, he knows he needs a political advantage, right? He wants, number one, he wants to appoint someone to that job who won't run for governor against him. And he also wants to get votes from women who can just now vote, right? So he's trying to get the female vote, and he figures that like, even if I oppose the 19th Amendment, if I appoint this lady Felton to like a kind of symbolic position, then, you know, that'll, that'll burnish my reputation with the lady voters. If I make her technically a Congresswoman for like a day, then maybe I'll get the ladies' vote. Unfortunately, the Senate wasn't expected to be in session before the election that

• 42:44Robert Evans?

  would replace Felton, and she didn't bother traveling to Washington to take the oath of office. But then, like, she's not really planning to do anything about this. It doesn't sound very interesting. But then the president calls for a special session of Congress to work on a ship subsidy bill, and Hardwick loses his election. So first off, he's not really worried about competing against anyone anymore. And second, there's going to be a session through which Rebecca might actually get a chance to speak. So she starts lobbying to everyone who listened to her of like, hey, if you really want to get the ladies' vote, if you really want to show that you're serious about this, make me a senator for a day. It'll mean something to all the women out there who know it's going to happen eventually,

• 43:25Robert Evans?

  right? And she's very good at this. She's very good at campaigning. She's very good at like getting people, you know, to come around to her point of view on things. There were a lot of objections at the time. And according to newspaper coverage at the moment, like when this is all happening, if a single senator had objected to her being given that job for a day, it would have all failed. And a bunch of people had said like, yeah, I'll, I'll vote against letting a woman be on the Senate floor. But when it actually happens, none of them do fuck all to stop anything. Like, they're not actually willing. Which just says something there, too. And she's, gets inaugurated as a Senate gallery, and there's just tons of women watching. There's, there's thunderous applause. I'm

• 44:07Robert Evans?

  going to quote from Smithsonian Magazine discussing this moment. "The next morning, moments before she stepped down, she addressed her Senate colleagues, thanking them for their chivalric welcome, and telling them that though she was just now a remnant of the old South, she was the happiest woman in the United States. As Gidlow explains, after the 19th Amendment became law, black women were subjected to humiliating literacy tests, made to stand in line until polls closed, and even told that election officials wouldn't register them. The historian's attempt has identified at least one woman in Alabama who was sexually assaulted for attempting to vote. Black activists like Mary Church Terrell and Fannie Lou Hamer organized to fight voter suppression. But laws prohibiting voter discrimination on the basis of race weren't passed until 1965. The first black woman senator, Carol Mosley Braun of Illinois, was elected only in 1992."

• 44:52Robert Evans?

  So Felton gets to have her great moment and be the first female senator and go down in the history books, but it is a long time before that kind of, even that possibility exists for a black woman, right? But it does come finally in 92. Felton, after her brief period of time in Congress, goes back to Georgia and dies of pneumonia, 94 years old, January 24th, 1930. Yes. 94. This lady never died.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  What the fuck?

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  A long, long life.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  94?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Her evil fed into her body. She ate the souls of others, obviously.

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Kind of did. Kind of did.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Maybe that's why she liked the lynching. She needed those souls to live.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  That's the first female senator, Rebecca Felton. How are we feeling?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  So a wonderful, like, she massacred. She, she loved a good massacre. Who doesn't?

• 45:49Robert Evans?

  She did love a good massacre. Who doesn't like a good massacre? I liked a good massacre. She liked a bad massacre. I'll say that.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, I feel like it was a bad day for me to wear my Root for Women shirt because I'm not-

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  Not always. Not always. Nor should you 100% of the time dress them in politics. Sometimes they're Rebecca Felton.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  I mean, we have many, many a women that were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Sheesh. How does some, it's just baffling that-

• 46:21Speaker 01

  She ate the souls of the dead.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  How did she get so many things wrong when foundationally she had so many things right? That's a very complex character.

• 46:33Robert Evans?

  She's smart and observant enough that she can't not see who the real fault lies with her. She knows it's the white men, and she never disagrees with that. But once the white men are gone, she also is going to look and blame at this group of people, particularly black men, who are really upsetting the status quo around her that she values and her own position in it, you know? And I think kind of that's what's going on here. And I think also there's just this, this sense of the reason why she's so violently in, in support of lynching is she believes it's, someone has to do something because of how badly the, the white men fail in protecting these women, right? Now it's my job, I think is kind of her attitude.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  In general, I feel like she's like, I have to punish someone. Men. It's definitely men. I know that I can't, I can't do white men because they're too powerful for me. Like, so as a person who's observant and knows how to gain power, which we see in like every type of like superhero movie, like the evil person has someone underling who kind of understands this is wrong, but I'd rather be with you and get some rewards from you than punished with them.

• 47:40Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yeah. I think you really pretty much perfectly nailed it there.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's so interesting, too, because obviously the, the suffragette movement does break down. There is a big chunk of it that's like, I think white women should be able to vote. And there's a chunk of it that are like, no, we should, we should all be voting. And it's interesting that how Felton arrives at supporting the vote in the first place is just because like, well, we can't trust these white men anymore, right? We got to take this into our own hands to defend ourselves and our whiteness.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  A big chunk of the suffragettes, the leaders, were cool with the black men even, some of the black men. She's like, you know what? You can be a token. Definitely no black women, though. Definitely no black women.

• 48:20Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Well, anyway, pluggables to plug?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, I love, yeah, uh, yes. I am on Stuff Mom Never Told You. We also talk about some dark things in history. To be fair, we've had a whole episode about ICE and how awful that is. And it's ongoing because, you know, it's awful. So if you want to listen to stuff like that, we also talk about historical things that could be a little more fun, or at least uplifting, because we know it's dark and dim and oh my God, why. We also have a book where we talk about a lot of things about feminism and intersexual feminism's over, it's a feminism's, over like all of history. So yeah, you can check that out wherever you find books, all the books. Independent bookstores are best, though.

• 49:04Robert Evans?

  Check that out. And yeah, check out us next week when we'll be back with Someone Else Bad.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And a friend, friend of both our pods, Bridget Todd, has a new audiobook coming out, Love at First Prompt: AI in the Future of Intimacy. It explores AI relationships from sex and romance to friendship, grief, and emotional support and what happens when big tech begins to commodify our most intimate relationships. So check it out.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  She's on our show once a month, talking about this stuff. We love her.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  We love Bridget.

• 49:33Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Excellent.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  All right.

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  Everybody.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 50:37Speaker 05

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• 50:55Speaker 04

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed.

• 50:59Speaker 07

  People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  It's real.

• 51:05Speaker 07

  This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 51:11Speaker 07

  White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:25Speaker 03

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