ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the most disturbing and complex instance of violence in the United States, namely the lynching of African American men, women, and children at the hands of white mobs in the South during the "lynching era", circa 1880–1930. It develops a theoretical and conceptual framework elaborating important cultural aspects of intergroup violence. The book reviews the economic, political, and social developments taking place from the antebellum period, via the Reconstruction period, to the post-Reconstruction period, paying particular attention to the transformation of dominant racial group narratives, boundaries, categories, and identities, necessary for understanding lynching as a racial group-making practice within the rise of Jim Crow South. It also demonstrates how public but not private lynchings were dispositive of as well as conducive to the collective racial identifications, affinities, and solidarities of extremist white supremacy among southern whites around 1900s.