Capital Punishment and the Legacies of Slavery and Lynching in the United States

Rigby, David L.; Seguin, Charles

doi:10.1177/00027162211016277

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…The valorization of violent punishment borne of the lynching era, although expressly anti-Black, can be appropriated for the control of other marginalized groups, including White individuals suspected of violating the law and other social boundaries. This is consistent with research by Jacobs and colleagues (Jacobs et al, 2005, 2012), for example, who find that histories of lynching lead to increased rates of capital punishment and incarceration that are not race-specific (see also Rigby & Seguin, 2021; Zimring, 2003). Similarly, Ward et al (2019) find that lynching associates with an increased likelihood of corporal punishment in southern counties for all students, Black or White, although the association is somewhat larger for the corporal punishment of Black students.…”

Section: Lynching's Legacy and Law Enforcementsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Research links geographic variation in legacies of racial violence, in the form of slavery, lynching, and Ku Klux Klan mobilization, to a host of current social phenomena. Among others, these include racial attitudes (Acharya et al, 2016); violence (McVeigh & Cunningham, 2012;Messner et al, 2005); hate crime enforcement (King et al, 2009); capital executions (Jacobs et al, 2005;Rigby & Seguin, 2021;Vandiver et al, 2006); White supremacist mobilization (Durso & Jacobs, 2013;Owens et al, 2015); racial inequality in poverty and education (Curtis & O'Connell, 2017;O'Connell, 2012;Reece & O'Connell, 2015); electoral politics (Abbot & Bailey, 2021); population change (O'Connell et al, 2020); and corporal punishment in schools (Ward et al, 2019). These inquiries make compelling assertions as to the enduring force of historical racial violence on present racial inequality.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Lynching Era and Contemporary Lethal Police Shootings in the South

2022

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The rate of police-involved killings in the U.S. greatly exceeds that of other industrialized nations and is highly racially disproportionate. Yet, we know relatively little about the antecedents of police violence, and even less about what explains the distribution of police killings across space. We ask whether there is a connection between contemporary police killings in the U.S. and the country's unique history of racial subjugation and violence. We focus particularly on lynching era violence in the South between 1877 and 1950 during which vigilantes killed thousands of Blacks and hundreds of Whites. We propose three main pathways through which lynchings shape law enforcement practices today: legacies of racialized criminal threat, brutalization, and legal estrangement. Analyzing Mapping Police Violence data that provide a more complete picture of lethal police force than currently available government databases, we find that lynching, regardless of victim race, moderately associates with present-day lethal police shootings of Blacks. We find some evidence that lynching also associates with lethal shootings of Whites, although this finding depends of model specification. On balance, our results suggest that lynching's legacy for law enforcement may operate through enduring cultural supports for severe punishment.

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Section: Lynching's Legacy and Law Enforcementsupporting

confidence: 90%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lynching Era and Contemporary Lethal Police Shootings in the South

2022

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“…A small body of research has examined slavery's role in predicting contemporary criminal justice outcomes (Gottlieb & Flynn, 2021;Gouda & Rigterink, 2017;King et al, 2009;Nash et al, 2004;Rigby & Seguin, 2021;Ward, 2022;West, 2012). Scholars like King et al (2009) and Ward (2022), for example, explore the relationship between historical practices and contemporary police practices.…”

Section: The Contemporary Effects Of Slavery In Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)safe Spaces: The Relationship Between Slavery and Sexual Victimization of Black Women

Bailey

2023

J Interpers Violence

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Research exploring the correlates of sexual victimization has found sexual victimization to be associated with both individual- and contextual-level factors, including age, gender, poverty, and size of the female population. However, to date, research has been limited in exploring how historical factors, such as slavery, may be associated with the contemporary prevalence of sexual victimization of women. Historical accounts have often suggested that enslaved women often experienced sexual victimization during their enslavement. Despite these accounts, research has been limited in empirically exploring the relationship between slavery and the sexual victimization of Black women. Using the 1860 U.S. Census and the 2019 National Incidence-Based Reporting System, multilevel logistic regression analyses are employed to explore whether slavery is consequential for contemporary instances of Black female sexual victimization. In line with the “legacy effect” framework, the findings from the current study suggest that Black women are significantly more likely to be sexually victimized in counties characterized by larger enslaved populations in 1860. These findings illuminate how historical institutions, despite being outlawed, have contemporary consequences, particularly for Black women. These findings, discussions, avenues for future research, and policy implications are discussed below.

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“…Finally, a robust literature examines modern criminal-legal outcomes and their association with lynching, which is not only spatially correlated with slave dependence but-in the case of anti-Black, post-Reconstruction lynching-may itself be an important part of slavery's legacy (Rigby and Seguin 2021). Franklin Zimring (2003), investigating the empirical association between lynching and contemporary executions, suggests the death penalty serves as an extension of historic vigilantism.…”

Section: Historical Institutions Of Minority Social Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is not to suggest researchers have ignored slavery's legacy. On the contrary, some even suggest that post-Reconstruction lynching is best conceptualized as an important-albeit far from the only-mechanism 1082066S REXXX10.1177/23326492221082066Sociology of Race and EthnicityWard research-article2022 1 the university of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, uSA perpetuating slavery's legacy (Cunningham, Lee, and Ward 2021;Rigby and Seguin 2021). However, until the last decade or so, much of the scholarly examination of slavery's consequences remained primarily "theoretical, historical and speculative" (Reece 2019:2).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Legacy of Slavery and Contemporary Racial Disparities in Arrest Rates

Ward

2022

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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Scholars seeking to understand the consequences of historical regimes of violence and social control frequently turn their attention to lynching and its legacy. More recently, however, a small but growing body of scholarship across the social sciences has expanded the scope of this work by additionally focusing on slavery and, most notably, its enduring negative consequences for African-Americans in the U.S. South. Despite providing a more robust understanding of slavery’s effects across numerous spheres, slavery’s legacy of social control—in particular, its link to modern law enforcement—remains a frontier in need of further investigation. Moreover, a central theoretical weakness of this historical racial violence and social control literature has been the absence of attention given to the mechanisms that are a part of slavery’s legacy. This article addresses these issues by using quantitative techniques to examine the relationship between prior slave dependence and contemporary Black-White disparities in arrest rates. In Southern counties where slave dependence was greater in the past, today there exists greater disparities in the Black-White arrest rate for drug and violent crime related offenses. While slavery exerts direct effects, its legacy also persists indirectly by shaping population distributions and local levels of interracial threat and structural disadvantages facing minority communities. This article establishes empirically the extent to which dehumanizing institutions like slavery continue to blight state-run social control apparatuses in the South—notably law enforcement—and develops theoretical explanations of the mechanisms that are a part of slavery’s legacy.

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Capital Punishment and the Legacies of Slavery and Lynching in the United States

Cited by 7 publications

References 43 publications

The Lynching Era and Contemporary Lethal Police Shootings in the South

The Lynching Era and Contemporary Lethal Police Shootings in the South

(Un)safe Spaces: The Relationship Between Slavery and Sexual Victimization of Black Women

The Legacy of Slavery and Contemporary Racial Disparities in Arrest Rates

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