ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some historical perspective of violence by reviewing instances of collective violence in the United States. It describes a simple listing of some other varieties of social violence which have characterized intergroup relations in the United States and explores a widespread tradition of lawlessness. The violence and bloodshed which have accompanied adjustments in the accommodative pattern between whites and Negroes in the United States are not unique to interracial relations. The chapter examines a rough classification of periods in race relations in the country, the social forces which defined them, and the types of social violence which characterized them. The periods includes the period of slave insurrections and resistance; Civil War and Reconstruction; and the Second Reconstruction and the beginnings of the Great Migration. The periods also includes World War I and postwar boom and racial readjustment; interwar and Depression; World War II; and the period from World War II to 1965.
