Inspired by recent allegations that powerful men engaged in sexual abuse, droves of women are coming forward with their own stories. Campaigns in the name of justice, such as #MeToo, are sometimes imperfect and sometimes tough to swallow — a journalist, let alone a court, may bristle at uninvestigated, unconfirmed, and anonymous allegations being made public. Nonetheless, the moment is unprecedented. Yet uncertainty and fears of backlash loom, especially for women from marginalized communities, in which a variety of circumstances can make them hesitant to come forward. One campaign led by young black women, however, recently cast aside these fears and went public despite the complex social history that underlies their accusations: Young women from the historically black school Spelman College decided to make known their allegations against men from their brother school, Morehouse College. And the campaign is percolating into the national media’s coverage of sexual abuse. A few weeks ago, a series of plastic-covered paper signs were placed across the historically black colleges’ campuses, according to a local CBS affiliate in Atlanta. The signs bore accusations of alleged sexual assault. “Morehouse protects rapists, Spelman protects rapists,” read one of the signs, ostensibly intended to hold perpetrators and school administrations accountable. Some of the posters included the names of alleged perpetrators. For women at Spelman and across the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of historically black schools in the Georgia city, the campaign struck a chord. Though the schools took down the posters, women began sharing their stories of sexual abuse and trauma online. The hashtag #WeKnowWhatYouDid sprang up on Twitter and with it, the names of more men.

#WeKnowWhatYouDid occupies a particularly fraught corner of the national conversation around sexual abuse, where race, as it relates to gender, comes into the picture.

#WeKnowWhatYouDid occupies a particularly fraught corner of the national conversation around sexual abuse. The campaign sits at the convergence of a handful of charged and related issues: rampant sexual assault on college campuses and, in particular, at a historically black college, where race, as it relates to gender, comes into the picture. Two Spelman sophomores, Rachael McLaughlin and Alexis Woodard, who are involved in campus activism, told me the anonymous signs made people uncomfortable, but were “absolutely” due to an inadequate response from Morehouse and Spelman. The school administrations, they said, had not been responsive to allegations in the past. (Morehouse sent me a statement that didn’t address the posters directly but said the school “will investigate all claims of sexual harassment, sexual assault, violence, and discrimination filed with our Title IX Coordinator.” The school said it maintains an anonymous hotline to report claims.) McLaughlin said that when she first started college, she already knew about the issue of sexual assault. In 2016, she had heard of an anonymously operated Twitter account called “Raped at Spelman.” Woodard said Morehouse definitely had a problem; she said she knew one accused predator and had deduced through conversations with friends that there are “a lot of people who are serial rapists who are walking around the Morehouse campus.” The students spoke to the particular pressures at Spelman that can prevent women from coming forward. Woodard told me she knew at least one woman who came forward, but in the end, it was “not the guy being punished, but the girl being punished.” McLaughlin chimed in to note some of the historical circumstances that affect women at institutions like historically black colleges; she cited “remnants” of the reticence to come forward that exist amid, for example, black liberation struggles. “It was seen as being a race traitor by prioritizing your gender over your race,” she said. The situation creates “an impossible choice” for black women, according to Treva Lindsey, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University; the dynamic the Spelman students described is not uncommon. “Black women often feel as though they betray the entire Black community by coming forward about sexual violence,” she told me over email.

“Black women often feel as though they betray the entire Black community by coming forward about sexual violence.”