Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T13:20:33.609Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Lynching in the New South, Festival of Violence, and the Synergy of Two Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2021

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Special Forum: Lynching in the New South A Quarter of a Century Later
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 We recognize that mob violence is so widespread in the United States that it has victimized people with many racial identities. The overwhelming majority of them, however, were African Americans, and extensive evidence links the widespread practice of lynching with efforts to politically and economically suppress Black people. We therefore frame our discussion to foreground the role that lynching played as a tactic wielded by domestic terrorists focused on advancing white supremacy.

2 E.g., Beck, E.M., Massey, James L., and Tolnay, Stewart E., “The Gallows, the Mob, and the Vote: Lethal Sanctioning of Blacks in North Carolina and Georgia, 1882–1930,” Law and Society Review 23 (1989): 317–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, E.M. and Tolnay, Stewart E., “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882–1930,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 526–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, E.M. and Tolnay, Stewart E., “A Season for Violence: The Lynching of Blacks and Labor Demand in the Agricultural Production Cycle in the American South,” International Review of Social History 36 (1992): 124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corzine, Jay, Creech, James, and Corzine, Lin, “Black Concentration and Lynchings in the South: Testing Blalock’s Power-Threat Hypothesis,” Social Forces 61 (1983): 774–96Google Scholar; Corzine, Jay, Huff-Corzine, Lin, and Creech, James, “The Tenant Labor Market and Lynching in the South: A Test of the Split Labor Market Theory,” Sociological Quarterly 58 (1988): 261–78Google Scholar; Inverarity, James, “Populism and Lynchings in Louisiana, 1889–1896: A Test of Erikson’s Theory of the Relationship between Boundary Crises and Repressive Justice,” American Sociological Review 41 (1976): 262–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olzak, Susan, “The Political Context of Competition: Lynching and Urban Racial Violence, 1882–1914,” Social Forces 69 (1990): 395421 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soule, Sarah, “Populism and Black Lynchings in Georgia, 1890–1900,” Social Forces 71 (1991): 431–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E.M.. 1990, “Black Flight: Lethal Violence and the Great Migration, 1900 to 1930,” Social Science History 14 (1990): 347–70Google Scholar; Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E.M., “Racial Violence and Black Migration in the South, 1910 to 1930,” American Sociological Review 57 (1992): 103116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tolnay, Stewart E., Beck, E.M., and Massey, James L., “Black Competition and White Vengeance: Legal Execution of Blacks as Social Control in the American South, 1890 to 1929,” Social Science Quarterly 73 (1992): 627–44Google Scholar; Tolnay, Stewart E., Beck, E.M., and Massey, James L., “Black Lynchings: The Power Threat Hypothesis Revisited,” Social Forces 67 (1989): 605–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Capeci, Dominic J. Jr., “The Lynching of Cleo Wright: Federal Protection of Constitutional Rights During World War II,” Journal of American History 72:4 (1986): 859–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Downey, Dennis B. and Hyser, Raymond M., No Crooked Death: Coatesville, Pennsylvania and the Lynching of Zacchariah Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Frey, Robert Seitz and Thompson-Frey, Nancy, The Silent and the Damned: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1998)Google Scholar; Gambino, Richard, Vendetta: A True Story of the Worst Lynching in America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977)Google Scholar; MacLean, Nancy, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” Journal of American History 78:3 (1991): 917–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGovern, James R., Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

4 Ayer, Edward L., Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Wright, George C., Racial Violence in Kentucky: Lynchings, Mob Rule and Legal Lynchings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

5 Fitzhugh Brundage, W., Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Stewart, E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).Google Scholar

6 Hubert, M. Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations (New York: Wiley, 1967)Google Scholar; Raper, Arthur Franklin, The Tragedy of Lynching (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969).Google Scholar

7 Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations; Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching.

8 Tolnay and Beck, Festival of Violence. The states covered by FOV are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

9 Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations.

10 Tolnay and Beck, Black Flight.

11 Campney, Brent M.S., Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).Google Scholar

12 Bailey, Amy Kate and Tolnay, Stewart E., Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailey, Amy Kate, Tolnay, Stewart E., Beck, E.M., and Laird, Jennifer D., American Sociological Review 76:3 (2011): 18561884.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Beck, E.M., “Judge Lynch Denied: Combatting Mob Violence in the American South, 1877–1950.” Southern Cultures 21:2 (2015): 117139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Beck, E.M., Tolnay, Stewart E., and Bailey, Amy Kate, “Contested Terrain: The State vs. Threatened Mob Violence,” American Journal of Sociology 121:6 (2016): 1856–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hagen, Ryan, Makovi, Kinga, and Bearman, Peter, “Averted Lynching: The Influence of Political Dynamics on Southern Lynching Mob Formation and Lethality,” Social Forces 92:2 (2013): 757–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Makovi, Kinga, Hagen, Ryan, and Bearman, Peter, “The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930,” Sociological Science 3 (2016): 860–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Smangs, Mattias, Doing Violence, Making Race: Lynching and White Racial Group Formation in the U.S. South, 1882–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smangs, Mattias, “Interracial Status Competition and Lynching, 1882–1930,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39:10 (2016): 1849–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Beck, E.M. and Tolnay, Stewart E., “Confirmed Inventory of Southern Lynch Victims, 1882–1930.” Machine readable file available from authors (2018).Google Scholar

17 Carrigan, William D., The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1936–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Carrigan, William D. and Webb, Clive, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

18 Martinez, Monica Muñoz, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-American Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).Google Scholar

19 Williams, Kadida E., They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Trotti, Michael Ayers, “What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South,” Journal of American History 100:2 (2013): 375400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campney, Hostile Heartland; Feimster, Crystal, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

20 Pfeifer, Michael J., Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).Google Scholar

21 Post, Washington, “Fatal Force,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ (accessed Sept. 26, 2020).Google Scholar