6 - Race, Class, and Southern Racial Violence

Summary

No observer of life in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and certainly no African American, could overlook the thread of violence woven into race relations. Lynchings, race riots, and all manner of violence defined the boundaries of black life. Between 1865 and 1950, mobs hanged, shot, burned alive, and tortured to death thousands upon thousands of African Americans. Indeed, so widespread and frequent was mob violence that lynching became at once a measure of both American and southern exceptionalism. As early as 1903 James Cutler, an American sociologist, labeled lynching a distinctly American crime. He might well have added that it was an increasingly southern one. More recently, scholars of comparative race relations have reached similar conclusions; in South Africa, for example, where white racism was at least as virulent as in the American South, no comparable tradition of extralegal violence developed. With good reason, then, scholars and observers may be inclined to conclude that racist violence in the modern American South had its own unique rhythms, intensity, and form.

Antiblack violence, without question, was rooted in historically contingent economic conditions and cultural formations in the American South. Yet, by concentrating on the impulses behind antiblack violence rather than the specific form that the impulses assumed, it may be possible to see similarities with racist violence and exclusionary behavior elsewhere. Much about racist violence in the postbellum South was rooted in a struggle over work and status, as well as racial and gender identities that had parallels in other modern societies.