ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the collective intergroup violence of public lynchings channeled the transformation of the symbolic racial boundaries embedded within extremist white supremacy, particularly ones related to interracial sexual relations between African American men and white women, into a social racial boundary of black stigma and exclusion fomenting the Jim Crow color-line. It presents evidence that as the myth of the "black rapist" gained traction in the decades around 1900, lynchings triggered by alleged sexual assaults on white women by black men more commonly assumed the form of public than private lynchings. The symbolic conjunction of racial and sexual boundaries in the post-Reconstruction South was naturally linked to the myth of the "black rapist". The rape-lynch complex opened space in the southern public sphere for realizing and naturalizing the racial categories of extremist white supremacy and facilitated southern whites attaining common knowledge and understanding of its underlying abstract pseudo-scientific concepts of black degeneracy.
