Lynch Victims as Marginal Men? Community Characteristics, Outsider Status, and Vulnerability to Mob Violence

• In Event: 467 - Regular Session. New Directions in the Study of the Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Abstract

This paper extends our earlier work on the characteristics of lynch victims. Here, we consider the possibility that the traits that affected individual vulnerability to mob violence may have had inconsistent effects across the South. We use a database we constructed using census records for more than 900 black and mixed race male lynch victims, as well as a comparison sample of similar men enumerated in counties that experienced a lynching. We examine whether the relationship between specific metrics of social marginality and the risk of lynching was dampened or amplified based on how common that trait was within the local community. Our findings suggest that men whose marginality was more unusual within their local context experienced substantially heightened threat of attack, and that some attributes even exerted a protective effect when they became particularly common.

Authors

• Amy Kate Bailey, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Stewart E. Tolnay, University of Washington