ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the incidence of crimes against the person and property, including homicide, rape, larceny, and arson, the creation of new miscegenation and sexual violence offenses, and summary justice in the South during the last third of the nineteenth century. The laws governing criminal offenses were generally written in race-neutral terms but offenders encountered systems of laws and punishments that were increasingly subjective in their application, particularly following the reestablishment of white Democratic political dominance. One historian of the period notes that while urban lower-class blacks were subject to the kinds of discrimination faced by poor people in general, they also suffered because of racial bias. The late nineteenth century was an important period of racial, legal, and penal transition between the end of civil war and slavery and the completion of black disfranchisement and racial segregation in communities across the South, but the end results were deeply problematic for lower-class whites and particularly African Americans.
