National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941

Abstract

Historians are increasingly studying lynching outside of the American Southeast, but sociologists have been slow to follow. We introduce a new public data set that extends existing data on lynching victims to cover the contiguous United States from 1883 to 1941. These data confirm that lynching was a heterogeneous practice across the United States. We differentiate between three different regimes over this period: a Wild West regime, characterized mostly by the lynching of whites in areas with weak state penetration; a slavery regime, found in former slave states, characterized mostly by the lynching of blacks; and a third minor regime, characterized by the lynching of Mexican nationals mostly along the Texas-Mexico border. We also note great variability at the county level in the extent of lynching. By contrast, we find very little state-level variability in lynching once local and regional regimes are considered. We discuss the implications of local and regional heterogeneity for quantitative lynching research using these data.

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

“…The execution of Whites may shed light on the mechanisms through which these legacies operate. Lynching of Whites occurred less frequently but over a wider geographic swath of the United States, including in significant numbers in the West (see, e.g., Seguin and Rigby 2019). If lynching increased attitudinal support for lethal punishment generally, we would hypothesize that h2: There will be more executions of Whites in places where more Whites were lynched.…”

Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past

“…gaby shows how shifts in the scale and conceptualization of lynching estimates can alter our conclusions around how historical violence shaped subsequent patterns and practices of residential segregation. This insight also undergirds Rigby and Seguin's use of their National Lynching Dataset (see Seguin and Rigby 2019) to extend Tolnay and Beck's (1995) canonical database both temporally and spatially, to cover acts of mob violence outside of the South. By emphasizing a fuller range of events, they demonstrate, first, how the logic of lynching as a form of racialized social control shifts when accounting for actions occurring in the thirtyeight contiguous states outside of the former Confederacy.…”

“…This truncated definition of violence interacts as well with our understanding of racial violence's geography. while scholars and activists have more recently offered important advances in docu menting national patterns of lynching and other racialized violence (see Pfeifer 2013;Martinez 2018;Seguin and Rigby 2019), the predominant focus on atroci ties rooted regionally in the u.S. South has skewed the geographic scope of lega cies research.…”

Learning to kill: Why a small handful of counties generates the bulk of US death sentences

“…(Research finds a geographical connection between historical lynchings and contemporary death sentences; see [ 14 , 15 ].) We obtained lynching data for the Southern counties from [ 16 ] and for the remaining counties from [ 17 ]. Racial threat is defined as 100 − |70–percentage of population white|; background on this variable is described in [ 18 ] and [ 19 ].…”