Portrait of sharecropper Matt Ingram, convicted of “rape by leer” for staring at a white woman, 1953. Photographed by John G. Zimmerman.
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In 1951, Matt Ingram, a black tenant farmer in Yanceyville, North Carolina, ‘was charged with assault with intent to rape a white girl, although he was around 70 feet away from her at the time. He was eventually convicted of assault, however, based on her fear of his supposed “reckless eyeballing”.’
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A 17-year-old white girl named Willa Jean Boswell testified that she was scared when her neighbor Ingram looked at her from a distance of about 70 feet. Prosecutors demanded a conviction of assault with intent to rape that was reduced to assault on a female by the judge, leading to a two year sentence. He was defended by a white lawyer, Ernest Frederick Upchurch, Sr.
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At the appeal in Superior Court, the judge instructed the jury that Ingram was guilty if he used “intentional threats or menace of violence such as looking at a person in a leering manner, that is, in some sort of sly or threatening or suggestive manner, he causes another to reasonably apprehend imminent danger” The all-white jury again returned a conviction, leading to a six month sentence of labor on the roads, suspended for five years.
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However, after pressure from the NAACP the state supreme court vacated the conviction because: “it cannot be said that a pedestrian may be assaulted by a look, however frightening, from a person riding in an automobile some distance away. He may have looked with lustful eyes but there was the absence of any overt act.” Ingram spent over two years in prison while his three trials took two and a half years to resolve.