Frances Thompson

Frances Thompson was a formerly enslaved Black transgender woman and anti-rape activist who was one of the five Black women to testify before a congressional committee that investigated the Memphis Riots of 1866. She is believed to be the first transgender woman to testify before Congress. Thompson and a housemate, Lucy Smith, were attacked by a mob of white terrorists and were among many freedwomen who were raped during the riots.[1] In 1876, Thompson was arrested for "being a man dressed in women's clothing".[2]

Frances Thompson
Died1876

Memphis Riots of 1866

Memphis Riots of 1866 began after a group of Black soldiers, women, and children began to gather in a public space in South Memphis. After the police attempted to break up the group, arresting two soldiers, gunshots broke out which subsequently led to rioting.[3] For three days, white male terrorists targeted communities of Black residents, starting fires, killing Black people and raping Black women.[4]

During these attacks, Thompson's and Smith's house was targeted by white men who questioned their affiliation with union soldiers.[1] Thompson would later testify during the congressional committee that the men demanded that they (Thompson and Smith) make them food, and they obliged. After which, the men demanded a "woman to sleep with", which Thompson refused; the men raped both Thompson and Smith.[1]

1876 arrest

In July of 1876, Thompson was fined $50 for cross-dressing. She was forced to undergo numerous physician's examinations in which four physicians "confirmed" that her "biological sex" was male.[5] She identified as a woman.[2] Conservatives used her arrest as a "man dressed in women's clothing" as ammunition to discredit her story of being raped during the riots 10 years prior. This fueled an even larger campaign to refute white racial terror against Black people in the south.[2] The discovery of Thompson's identity was also used to discredit other Black women's claims of rape by white men, and suggested that the entire congressional report that Thompson had testified in was only manufactured propaganda in support of Reconstruction.[1]

Death

After she was arrested for "cross dressing," she was sentenced to the city's chain gang, where she was forced to wear men's clothes and abused while serving time. Thompson moved to North Memphis after she was released. She was found seriously ill and moved to a hospital where she died of dysentery. Coroner's reports say that Thompson was anatomically male, but newspaper reports stated that some in Memphis had understood her to be intersex, and that she had stated she was "of double sex".[6]

References
  1. Rosen, Hannah (1999). Hodes, Martha (ed.). Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. New York and London: New York University Press. pp. 267–286. ISBN 0814735568.
  2. Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom : Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Accessed December 20, 2017.
  3. Ash, Stephen (2013). A massacre in Memphis : the race riot that shook the nation one year after the Civil War. New York: New York : Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 100–.
  4. Valdivia Rude, Mey (November 15, 2015). "10 Trans Women Pioneers They Definitely Didn't Tell You About In History Class".
  5. https://vugradhistory.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/frances-thompson-survivor-of-the-memphis-massacre/
  6. Beverly Greene Bond, Susan Eva O'Donovan, Remembering the Memphis Massacre: An American Story (2020), page 96
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