Scott Stern has published The NAACP’s Rape Docket and the Origins of Criminal Procedure in volume 24 of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law & Social Change. The abstract summarizes that:
This Article provides the definitive account of the surprisingly voluminous docket of rape cases argued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It argues, for the first time, that the NAACP’s rape docket was central to the development of modern criminal procedure—to the establishment of the right to counsel, the right to remain silent, the right to a trial free from mob violence or influence, the right against self-incrimination via a coerced confession, and the right to a jury of one’s peers selected without discrimination. Drawing on original archival research, this Article demonstrates that all of these rights have their origins in the hundreds of cases argued by the NAACP on behalf of Black men accused of sexual assault by white women. * * * *
[T]his Article examines cases in which the NAACP advocated for Black women who accused white men of sexual assault. Throughout its history, the national office of the NAACP advocated for Black female rape survivors only rarely. In contrast, the local branches of the Association did advocate for dozens of Black women who had been raped by white men, often pushing the police to investigate, the prosecutors to bring charges, and sometimes even hiring their own attorneys to aid in prosecutions. Yet at no point did NAACP attorneys ever challenge the rape laws that placed punitively high demands on assault survivors and impeded countless prosecutions. This was largely because NAACP attorneys embraced the very politics of respectability that justified sexist rape laws; indeed, NAACP attorneys capitalized on the gendered aspects of these laws in their representation of Black men accused of rape. Although many Black women throughout the decades demanded the NAACP engage more often in anti-rape work, such pleas usually met with silence. Had the NAACP acceded to these demands and pushed for a criminal procedure focused on protecting rape survivors as well as rape suspects, the greater protections that contemporary rape laws now provide for survivors could have come about much sooner.
The article also unpacks some of the relationship between the NAACP’s rape docket and its relationship to the feminist movement.