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Collective Violence, Status Ambiguity, and Elite Signals: Urban Lynchings 1910-1920

Tue, August 15, 2:30 to 4:10pm, Palais des congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 512E

Abstract

The archetypal image of a Southern lynching is a rural one. The extensive and distinguished scholarship on lynchings in the U.S. South has accordingly looked primarily to the dynamics of the South’s rural economy to explain lynching dynamics. Yet much white mob violence against blacks took place in cities, and the scholarship on collective violence more broadly has emphasized the significance of status ambiguity in predicting group conflict. The authors here draw on previously unavailable Census data at the city level and a new dataset of mob formation to test the salience of increasing black white status ambiguity in predicting white collective violence. Using local white-black gaps in school attendance as a proxy, the authors find that greater status ambiguity is associated with higher levels of white violence. Using the enactment of local laws codifying white dominance as another measurey for status ambiguity, the authors find that contrary to expectation these elite signals of white supremacy are associated with increased levels of white collective violence against African Americans. The findings suggest that status ambiguity is an important factor in predicting lynchings and other forms of white violence and that extralegal collective white violence can be conceptualized as an extension of white supremacist public policies.

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