13 - The Time Series of Lynchings in the American South

Summary

My studies of the riots left me wanting to investigate fluctuations over time in the rate of collective violence. As noted in Chapter 12, this could not be done with the riot data; I therefore chose to examine an altogether different kind of collective violence, one that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century: lynchings of black Americans. The phenomenon of lynching speaks to the brutal dark side of American southern culture; some 5,000 persons were murdered in this manner. The data on lynchings have a rich history in social science research, in large part because they provide a long time series of a rather infamous nature. There are published records covering the period 1882 to 1966. Moreover, when we look at the time series, we see that it is much more complicated than the one for the riots of the 1960s. This complexity makes it easier to choose among competing explanations of the lynching rate. With these data, our focus is not on the idiosyncratic causes of particular lynchings, but on accounts of the varying rate over time. If we're willing to work with explanations that are likely to hold over a lengthy interval, then our time-series study might yield findings of value. To put it another way, with data covering a long period of time, there should be few plausible explanations that are consistent with the complexity of the time series.