Law Enforcement Intervention in Lynch Mob Activity in the Southern United States 1882-1930

• In Event: 366 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session II
  In Refereed Roundtable: B. Table 10. The South

Abstract

This paper examines how patterns of law enforcement intervention in lynch mob activity shaped the epidemic of violence that claimed thousands of African American lives in the Southern United States from 1882 to 1930. Analyzing an inventory of more than 1,000 averted and completed lynching events from three Southern states, we identify three distinct but overlapping phases that constitute all lynching events: (1) Mob formation; (2) the opportunity for law enforcement intervention, conditional on mob formation; and (3) the interaction between the mob and intervening actors, conditional on an intervention attempt, the outcome of which determines whether mob formation ends in a lynching or an averted lynching. We then present three sets of analysis modeling the probability of each of these three phases, given a set of political and economic variables. Building on earlier work, we demonstrate that political, rather than economic, factors most strongly determined the shape and character of the lynching epidemic. Lynch mob violence increased, and law-enforcement intervention was rarest, in the period during which white supremacist Redeemers consolidated their hold on Southern statehouses through the toxic politics that powered the campaign to disenfranchise African Americans. After disenfranchisement, this same political elite worked to defend its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, fighting lynch mobs by encouraging law-enforcement intervention in lynch mob activity, driving down the lynching rate through 1930.

Authors

• Kinga Reka Makovi, Columbia University

• Ryan Alansson Lee Hagen, Columbia University

• Peter S. Bearman, Columbia University