Our Past Betrays Us: Collective Memory, Homicide and Southern Lynching (original) (raw)
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Research finds that historic racial violence helps predict spatial distributions of contemporary outcomes, including homicide. These findings underscore the continued need to historicize modern race relations, yet intervening processes linking past violence with present events remain unclear. This study examines these intermediary mechanisms by reducing the century-long time-lapse common to legacy of racial violence research. We use mid-century measures of violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement to bridge the historical gap between lynchings and later homicide, thus clarifying the dynamic and contingent nature of the legacy of racial violence. Structural equation models indicate that incidents of anti-civil rights enforcement and contemporary homicides are more likely to occur in areas with pronounced histories of lynching. Civil rights era assaults mediate the relationship between lynchings and contemporary homicide generally, but not White-on-Black homicide, signaling a need for further research documenting events of mid-century racial violence and clarifying these and other sources of historical transmission. Implications for future research and public policy are considered.
The Transmission of Historical Racial Violence
Race and Justice, 2015
Research finds that historic racial violence helps predict spatial distributions of contemporary outcomes, including homicide. These findings underscore the continued need to historicize modern race relations, yet intervening processes linking past violence with present events remain unclear. This study examines these intermediary mechanisms by reducing the century-long time-lapse common to legacy of racial violence research. We use mid-century measures of violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement to bridge the historical gap between lynchings and later homicide, thus clarifying the dynamic and contingent nature of the legacy of racial violence. Structural equation models indicate that incidents of anti-civil rights enforcement and contemporary homicides are more likely to occur in areas with pronounced histories of lynching. Civil rights era assaults mediate the relationship between lynchings and contemporary homicide generally, but not White-on-Black homicide, signaling a ne...
Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900
Social Forces, 1992
This research tests general claims of how political and economic competition affected county-level variation of black lynching rates in Georgia in the 1890s. The central argument is that rates of racial violence rose when interracial competition increased. This increase was due primarily to black migration to southern manufacturing areas, black participation in the cotton economy, and the rise of black participation in the Populist movement. To address morefully the politicalfacet of interracial competition, wefirst analyze theforces leading to the Populist movement. Wefind that black counties and counties with a higher degree offarm tenancy were more likely to have supported Populist candidates, and that manufacturing counties were less likely to vote Populist. IA4en we analyze the causes of lynching, we find that lynching rates increased when economic competition increased, but that counties that voted Populist did not have significantly higher rates of black lynching. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), between the years of 1889 and 1900, 3,224 people in the U.S. fell victim to the hands of lynch mobs.' Of these victims, 2,522, or 78.2%, were black. Lynching represents an extreme form of racial violence, and the study of the phenomenon allows for comparison with other analyses about different forms of racial or ethnic violence. This project applies general arguments about racial violence as a function of intergroup competition for economic and political resources to black lynching in Georgia in the late nineteenth century. Historical and sociological explanations for lynching and other forms of racial violence are varied, but historians and sociologists agree that forces that increased competition between groups for economic and/or political resources heightens intergroup antagonism (
The Lynching Era and Contemporary Lethal Police Shootings in the South
Race and Justice, 2022
The rate of police-involved killings in the U.S. greatly exceeds that of other industrialized nations and is highly racially disproportionate. Yet, we know relatively little about the antecedents of police violence, and even less about what explains the distribution of police killings across space. We ask whether there is a connection between contemporary police killings in the U.S. and the country's unique history of racial subjugation and violence. We focus particularly on lynching era violence in the South between 1877 and 1950 during which vigilantes killed thousands of Blacks and hundreds of Whites. We propose three main pathways through which lynchings shape law enforcement practices today: legacies of racialized criminal threat, brutalization, and legal estrangement. Analyzing Mapping Police Violence data that provide a more complete picture of lethal police force than currently available government databases, we find that lynching, regardless of victim race, moderately associates with present-day lethal police shootings of Blacks. We find some evidence that lynching also associates with lethal shootings of Whites, although this finding depends of model specification. On balance, our results suggest that lynching's legacy for law enforcement may operate through enduring cultural supports for severe punishment.
The Legacy of a Lynching: Community and Familial Adaptation in the Wake of Racial Trauma
2018
The history of lynching in America has been shaped by statistics, trends, and characterizations of the mobs involved in the murder of an accused individual. But, few have studied the lives and the communities of the victims of the lynchings, and even fewer have sought to recreate the circumstances in which the lynchings took place by means of digital resources and tools. As a result, the memory of a lynching is often defined by purported criminality, angry mobs, and an eventual death, rather than by the community conditions that precipitated the lynching, the life lost during the murder, and the community condition thereafter. In this thesis, I introduce the notion of personhood in lynching victims through the case study of a single victim: Eugene Daniel from New Hope Township, North Carolina, who was murdered just six days after his sixteenth birthday in 1921. This thesis argues that one cannot separate people from the context in which they live; acts of racial violence, like lynchings, neither exist in a vacuum nor solely affect the murdered individual. I further argue that modern digital tools allow historians to gain a better understanding of the circumstances that perpetuated lynchings, the communities in which lynchings occurred, and the contemporary implications of historic acts of violence.
Social Problems, 2023
Scholarship on slavery's legacy and enduring consequences has largely been limited to the South under the assumption that this region continues to be more deeply affected by slavery than other regions, notably the Northeast. Also overlooked is the extent to which slavery's consequences generalize beyond Black disadvantage, harming other racialized ethnic minority groups such as Latinos. Scholarship has paid little attention to the role of the state's institutions of social control—notably, law enforcement—in transmitting slavery’s legacy after its formal abolishment. I address these issues using quantitative techniques assessing the relationship between prior slave dependence and contemporary policing practices in U.S. Southern and Northeastern counties. I argue that as a result of slavery's influence on local legal apparatuses and institutions of social control—in areas in the South and Northeast where slave dependence was greater—law enforcement today is less likely to protect minorities, resulting in higher rates of hate crime underreporting by police. Findings reveal slavery’s nefarious consequences disadvantage Black populations but also spillover to Latinos, particularly in the South. In both regions, contemporary Black population concentration mediates slavery’s relationship with the rate of police underreporting of anti-Black crimes.
The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930
2016
Collective violence when framed by its perpetrators as " citizen " justice is inherently a challenge to state legitimacy. To properly account for such violence, it is necessary to consider an opportunity structure incorporating the actions of both vigilantes and agents of the state. The motivation and lethality of lynch mobs in the South cannot be understood without considering how the state reacted to the legitimacy challenges posed by lynching. We trace the shifting orientation of state agents to lynching attempts between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Depression. Analyzing an inventory of more than 1,000 averted and completed lynching events in three Southern states, we model geographic and temporal patterns in the determinants of mob formation, state intervention, and intervention success. Opponents of lynching often pled with mobs to " let the law take its course. " This article examines the course followed by the law itself, as state actors moved between encouraging, accommodating, and in many instances averting mob violence.