A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930This finely detailed statistical study of lynching in ten southern states shows that economic and status concerns were at the heart of that violent practice. Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck empirically test competing explanations of the causes of lynching, using U.S. Census and historical voting data and a newly constructed inventory of southern lynch victims. Among their surprising findings: lynching responded to fluctuations in the price of cotton, decreasing in frequency when prices rose and increasing when they fell. |
Contents
A Legacy of Racial Violence | 1 |
A Portrait of the Lynching Era 18801930 | 17 |
Social Threat Competition and Mob Violence | 55 |
Lynching as Popular Justice | 86 |
The Role of King Cotton | 119 |
Southern Politics and Lynching 18801900 | 166 |
The Great Migration and the Demise of Lynching | 202 |
The Tragedy of Lynching An Overview | 239 |
The Creation of a New Inventory of Southern Lynchings | 259 |
Types of Errors and Other Problems in Existing Inventories | 265 |
Miscellaneous Tables | 269 |
| 277 | |
| 289 | |
Common terms and phrases
African-American Alabama areas Atlanta Constitution behavior black and white black labor black lynch victims black migration black out-migration black population black victims black voters caste coefficient competition cotton dominance cotton prices Cotton South counties crime criminal decades economic example farmers Figure Florida formal justice system Georgia included inventory King Cotton legal executions lethal Louisiana lynch mobs lynchings and executions Mississippi mob violence motivated murder NAACP Negro number of black number of lynchings offenses pattern Percent population black period planters and employers political threat model poor whites popular justice price of cotton punishment race racial violence rape Raper reasons regression relationship relatively Republican party social control South Carolina southern blacks southern lynchings southern politics southern society southern whites Table tenants threatened time-series tion Tippah County Tolnay trends U.S. Congress variables Victims of White white community white elite white farm white lynch mobs white mobs white supremacy Yazoo County