Atrocity Lynchings: A Test of the Theory of Moral Time

• In Event: The Behavior of Pure Sociology: Past and Present

Abstract

Thousands of people have been lynched in the United States. All lynchings are violent deaths, but some are more gruesome than others. Atrocity lynchings involve macabre methods (e.g. burned at the stake, skinned alive), torture (e.g. branding, sexual assault), and post-mortem indignities (e.g. dismemberment, public display of remains). Can Donald Black’s (2011) theory of moral time explain variation in the brutality of lynchings? Drawing on a stratified random sample of cases from Beck and Tolnay’s public inventory of Southern lynchings, our findings support the theoretical prediction: atrocity lynchings are a direct function of the movement of social time that preceded the killing. The pattern remains after controlling for state and year in a fixed effects logistic regression model; for each unit-increase in the movement of social time, the odds of an atrocity lynching are 1.3 times greater (p < .05).

Authors

• Scott Phillips, University of Denver

• Mark Cooney, University of Georgia