Opinion | The historical truth about women burned at the stake in America? Most were Black.

August 18, 2024

Kali Nicole Gross is the national endowment for the humanities professor of African American studies at Emory University. Her forthcoming book is “Vengeance Feminism: Lessons from Lawless Black Women.”

Popular lore surrounding the Salem witch trials summons images of wrongly accused White women and girls bound to stakes and perched atop flaming pyres. But an accurate portrayal of U.S. history would look extremely different — and provide an ugly but all-too-familiar confirmation of what we know about the power of historical erasure.

So let’s talk about a part of our history almost no one knows. Of the approximately 25 women and girls convicted of witchcraft in the 13 colonies between 1648 and 1692, none met their end strapped to a stake; they were all hanged. And while it’s true that women of this period were burned at the stake as a form of capital punishment, most of them were not White — they were Black.

It’s not easy to absorb these events. But we need to. To illuminate them is to shine a light not only on long-standing racial biases in American justice but also to show that bigotry has been present from the beginning.

In his diary entry on Sept. 22, 1681, Increase Mather — father of the legendary clergyman Cotton Mather and later a president of Harvard College — wrote of “a negro woman who burnt 2 houses at Roxbury July 12.” The woman, Maria, described as a servant — often a euphemism for an enslaved person at the time ― of Joshua Lambe, was convicted of arson for using a hot coal to set fire to the house of a local doctor and Lambe’s home.

As punishment, Mather wrote, “the negro woman was burned to death.” He went on to explain that she was the first woman to suffer this fate in New England.

Maria was also the first woman to receive such a sentence in the 13 colonies. And her brutal death would prove to be the start of a grim pattern in American justice.

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Beginning with Maria’s execution and ending with the last known woman burned at the stake — which, according to the Espy File on U.S. executions from 1608 to 2002, was a Black woman in North Carolina in 1805 — the overwhelming majority of women to face the fatal fires of justice, 87 percent, were Black.

Five myths about the Salem witch trials

Convicted of either arson or murder, Black women faced harsher sentences than did White women accused of the same crimes. White women were usually spared from the searing flames; if these women did receive capital sentences, they met their deaths dangling from a noose.

Maria’s case highlights other ominous legal legacies. Throughout much of the nation’s history, Black women constituted the lion’s share of female death penalty cases, especially during and after the Civil War. Black women also have the dubious distinction of setting several historic capital punishment “firsts.”

Just as Maria was the first woman burned at the stake, the first women to be executed in New York and New Jersey were Black. The youngest girl put to death via the electric chair was Virginia Christian, a 17-year-old African American, in 1912. Sentenced for killing her elderly White employer, the teenager could not be saved, even by the mass mobilization of Black folks on her behalf.

What little we know about these cases foreshadows harmful stereotypes perpetuated about Black women, particularly the notion that they were especially dangerous and homicidal. According to Mather, for instance, Maria was not just an arsonist but a killer. In one of the houses she set aflame, he wrote, “a child was burnt to death.” Yet court documents made no mention of any such victims.

In fairness to Mather, court records of the period are maddeningly sparse. In Maria’s case, missing is any mention of a motive, save that she lacked a fear of God and was instigated to wickedness “by the divil.” We also don’t know Maria’s age or origins. Had she been born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony or imported from the Caribbean or the African continent? And there is no satisfactory explanation for why other Black servants, cleared of wrongdoing, were nonetheless removed from the colony.

Maria’s case exists as an apt metaphor for the treatment of Black women in the historical record, illustrating a dynamic as tragic as it is timeless. Back then, White people didn’t bother to document the lives of Black women. Today, as evidenced by aggressive efforts to restrict the teaching of the United States’ racial history, many White people want even the limited remnants buried.

If we are to effectively work toward equal justice in this country, we must know this history and understand its impact on Black women’s lives. In the present, we cannot allow racist tyranny to silence the past. The testimonies exist. We must hear them.

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