Modernization and Lynching in the New South

• In Event: 252 - Regular Session. Violence and the State

Abstract

A broad consensus exists in the literature of the causal primacy of rural factors in southern lynching. This article evaluates the arguments of a recently emerging body of scholarship positing an alternative view of lynching as integral to southern modernization. Drawing on lynching data from Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930, neither analyses pooling all events nor analyses differentiating events according to level of communality find any evidence of a positive relationship between lynching and indices of modernization (urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural commercialization). The findings imply that arguments of a close connection between modernization and lynching are overstated, that the forces and consequences of the complex social developments coinciding with the lynching era were not uniform throughout the South, and that racial conflicts took different forms in modernizing and rural agricultural areas.

Author

• Mattias Smångs, Fordham University