4 - Racial Violence in the United States since the Civil War

Summary

This chapter outlines key themes in the history of racial violence in modern America, as well as exemplary scholarship on this important subject. More important, the essay centers white supremacy as a primary motivator of racial violence across region and era. The emancipation of enslaved African Americans led to violent struggles over citizenship and civic equality in the Civil War’s wake, yet those struggles extended far beyond the postbellum south. Violence fueled campaigns to disenfranchise, segregate, and exclude non-whites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As the United States emerged as a global power in these same decades, ideologies of racial dominance informed American encounters with peoples abroad. Yet racial violence also spurred organization and protest, from African American anti-lynching campaigns to civil rights activism in Latinx, Native American, and Asian American communities, the history of racial violence is necessarily a dual history of repression and resistance. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, continued resistance to racial reform and full equality expresses itself in highly destructive and deeply systemic forms of violence.