Interracial status competition and southern lynching, 1882–1930

ABSTRACT

This article provides theoretical grounds and empirical evidence that different types of lynching in the post-Reconstruction South were driven by social processes at different levels of analysis. County-level analyses based upon new detailed data on lynchings in Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930 reveal that ‘private' lynchings, perpetrated by small groups outside the public purview without manifest ritual, were related to whites’ interracial status and social identity concerns on the interpersonal level, whereas ‘public' lynchings, involving larger mobs and ritualized violence, appear unaffected by such dynamics. These results validate relational and interactionist perspectives on violence, lend support to calls for disaggregation in the study of racial, ethnic, and nationalist violence, and shed light on the intertwining of racial identity formation with the generation of racial inequalities. They also carry implications for the study of contemporary ethno-racial hate crime.

KEYWORDS:

• Lynching
• racial violence
• event-history models
• social identity
• whiteness
• Jim Crow

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgments

I thank Peter Bearman, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Emily Erikson, Christine Fountain, Aaron Gullickson, Andrew Ritchey, Matthew Salganik, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lynching refers throughout this article to an extralegal killing of at least one black person by a mob of at least three white people.

2. To achieve sampling consistency and data comparability across states, the few discrepancies between the Tolnay-Beck inventory and Pfeifer's listing were resolved in favour of the former. Pfeifer's listing includes in total twelve events in Louisiana not included in the Tolnay-Beck inventory.

3. Beck and Tolnay have generously shared their original research notes with me and I have occasionally used them to complement the newspaper information.

4. Lynching events for which I lack sufficient newspaper information for classification as either public or private were assigned to a third category of “unknown” and were not included in the analyses. This category includes 47 (8%) of the total 597 lynchings in the present data. As events are more likely to get extensive and detailed newspaper coverage the larger and more dramatic they are, it is likely that most of the lynchings in the “unknown” category were private lynchings. At the suggestion of one reviewer I therefore conducted supplementary analyses classifying all lynchings in the “unknown” category as private lynchings. While the results of these analyses do not differ substantively from the results reported here in terms of the magnitude of focal coefficients, they do yield higher levels of statistical significance for focal coefficients. The results of analyses conversely classifying all lynchings in the “unknown” category as public lynchings do not differ substantively or statistically from the results reported here.

5. These variables are based upon information in “Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000” (Haines 2006) and U.S. Bureau of the Census (1913, 1922, 1932).

6. In order to assess the robustness of the results I conducted a number of supplementary analyses. First, I used the ratio of black to white SEI to measure interracial status competition, but these analyses did not produce substantively different results than the results presented here. Second, drawing on information in the IPUMS samples I conducted analyses measuring interracial status competition as the county-level difference in male adult literacy between whites and blacks. These analyses did not yield statistically or substantively significant results. Third, as suffrage gave blacks an opportunity to assert themselves as free independent citizens and claim equality with whites, I conducted analyses assessing whether the impact of interracial status competition on lynchings of each type varied between pre- and post-disfranchisement periods. The results of these analyses show no evidence that depriving blacks of the vote affected the dynamics between interracial status competition and different types of lethal mob violence. Lastly, I assessed whether lynchings may have been targeted at blacks of higher social standing independent of aggregate interracial status differentials by fitting models for private as well as public lynching from 1882 to 1930 including average black SEI along with the interracial status competition measure. These analyses did not generate statistically significant effects for black SEI or substantively alter other results.