ABSTRACT
Lynchings played into the formation of social boundaries establishing how people signified as "white" related and behaved towards people signified as "black" and into the formation of a solidary white racial collective as well as the formation of racial social identities among whites. Lynchings in all their variations were thus racial group-making social practices grounding the emerging Jim Crow order. Functioning as an instrumental tool of racial social control, lynchings played into exploitation processes by terrorizing and disciplining the large African American labor force within the southern agricultural economy characterized by landlessness, farm tenancy, crop-lien credit, and wherein economic advantage obtained monumentally to white landlords at the expense of impoverished rural blacks. The implementation and stabilization of Jim Crow depended on extensive agitation, organization, and mobilization among whites from all walks of southern life around common racial understandings, commitments, and purposes in a communal racial compact.
