Urban Legends

Popular mythology about urban life that has sometimes been used to keep African Americans subservient. Following the Civil War, white Southerners suddenly found themselves faced with a population of freed slaves. In a society built on the subjugation of African Americans, the idea of blacks as citizens frightened many whites, who saw free blacks as a threat to their way of life. As a result, whites created numerous ways to keep African Americans in a secondary class position, including the creation of urban legends.

Urban legends—stories believed to be true that pertain to contemporary customs, ideas, and events—circulated throughout American society from the 1800s onward. The unstated but rather obvious goal of these stories was to degrade African Americans. By characterizing blacks as unhygienic, unintelligent, or lazy, urban legends offered justification for the continuation of racial prejudice and the idea of white supremacy. Once such urban legends became a part of popular culture, disputing them and their veracity proved extremely difficult.

One of the earliest African American urban legends, concerning the hygiene of black women, appeared shortly after the Civil War. When disease epidemics occurred after the war in Southern cities, such as Atlanta, rumors circulated that African American domestic workers were to blame. This blame stemmed from claims that black women failed to bathe. As a result, the idea of African Americans as unhygienic disease carriers became accepted by whites, providing employers with justification to fire their black domestic help at will.

By the turn of the century, scientific racism added to the urban legends directed against African Americans. New academic disciplines, such as anthropology, studied cultural and physical attributes of the different races of people around the world. The new fields of study captivated people's imaginations and provided “scientific” support for racist ideology.

As anthropologists exhumed human remains from around the world, some argued that skulls from Africa were smaller than skulls found in Europe. According to proponents of scientific racism, the difference in skull sizes proved that African Americans possessed smaller brains than whites and were thus less intelligent. This idea found its way into the “urban legends” that circulated throughout the country.

As integration brought whites and blacks into more direct contact in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the early urban legends concerning African Americans were proved false. However, new urban legends arose to take their place, many of which downplayed black accomplishments. For example, when African American athletes began to dominate professional sports following integration in the 1940s and 1950s, urban legends appeared to discredit black success. One such story was that blacks possessed superior physical abilities because of selective breeding practices conducted by slaveowners during the period of slavery, and that these practices had resulted in certain attributes for blacks. Such urban legends placed black athletes on the level of racehorses, discrediting their hard work and intelligence.

Some recent urban legends focus on problems faced by African Americans in a modern urban society. As middle-class whites and businesses moved to the suburbs, downtown areas developed African American majorities. These black inner-city areas became associated with poor housing, high unemployment, and little opportunity for advancement. Accompanying this process was the development of urban legends that sought to justify the disparity in living conditions between whites and blacks. Two urban legends in particular stand out.

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