The lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South: A review of sociological and historical perspectives

Abstract

Research in sociology and history on the lynching of African Americans by White mobs in the U.S. South around 1900 has in recent decades grown and matured into a substantive research area in its own right. This article has four purposes. The first purpose is to review dominant sociological and historical approaches in the lynching literature. One key feature of this literature is its bifurcation into one strand of social scientific sociological lynching research and one strand of culturalist historical lynching research. As a consequence of this bifurcation, the study of lynching long lacked sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and history. The second purpose of this article is to review recent sociological studies that attempt to bridge the disjuncture between sociological and historical approaches otherwise characterizing lynching scholarship. The third purpose of this article is to review other recent studies moving sociological lynching scholarship beyond dominant approaches and foci, including investigations of averted lynchings and investigations of the individual-level characteristics that made African Americans more or less vulnerable to White lynch mobs. The last purpose is to suggest how the contributions of lynching research have implications for understanding present-day racial injustices and inequalities.

From Legacy to Memory: Reckoning with Racial Violence at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

“…11 More specifically, as scholars refine techniques for measuring lynching’s legacies, they may find it productive to investigate the role of memory and narrative in mediating the relationship between past and present (promising starting points include Gabriel and Tolnay 2017; O’Connell 2020). This is especially relevant given recent efforts to bridge the gap between social scientific efforts to measure lynching, on one hand, and culturalist historical accounts of lynching, on the other (Smångs 2017).…”

The White Working Class and the Legacy of the 1960s Ku Klux Klan in the 2016 Presidential Election

“…While research taking this approach, including studies on the long-term consequences of southern lynchings like the contribution to this volume from Abbott and Bailey provides important insights, its fuller potential remains untapped due to insufficient theoretical underpinnings (cf. Gabriel and Tolnay 2017; Smångs 2017b). This article demonstrates the fruitfulness of theoretically examining as well as empirically exploring the sociological nature of the processes, whereby racism’s past forms and manifestations temporally endure to reverberate decades later.…”

Troubling America's historical waters: Toward the transdisciplinary study of U.S. lynchings as an active present

“…However, in the 21st Century, numerous academic and public-facing scholars have joined her cause to illuminate diverse histories and legacies of lynching. Despite the historical pressures that academics faced to only study lynchings in the South in the 20th Century (Brundage, 2005), there is now a robust literature on U.S. lynchings consisting of sociological and historical contributions (Smångs, 2017b)-among others-that have enabled scholars to produce transdisciplinary insights of lynchings across U.S. regions. While many academics celebrate the breadth of these intellectual contributions, in principle, few are able to exhaust these comprehensive resources in practice because the diverse histories of U.S. lynchings are often siloed.…”