ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mutual influence between collective white identifications and the collective violence of public lynchings. It presents evidence demonstrating that public but not private lynchings were expressive as well as generative of the collective white racial identity mobilized through discursive and relational context provided by the southern Democratic Party. One way to construct a collective group identity is to stipulate a common history expressed in collective memories integrated within group narratives. The chapter explores how the post-Reconstruction southern racial conflict played out through the southern party system. Public lynchings should after the implementation of disfranchisement accordingly have been more likely in localities with comparatively high rather than low or intermediate levels of collective white identity. The ultimate success of radical white supremacy depended upon its ability to subsume economic, political, and social developments under one grand group narrative that encouraged southern whites to see themselves as part of a racially defined community even if their immediate lived circumstances.
