Political violence in the American South: 1882-1890

The racial status quo in the American South persisted through an unspoken detente between the federal government and the Southern state governments during the second half of the 19 th century. The political disenfranchisement of blacks took place in distinct stages following Reconstruction. In the 1880s, Jim Crowe had not yet been enacted but Reconstruction was over. Blacks were technically allowed to vote, but turnout was around five percent at any given election. The prevailing historical theory is that the threat of violence was a form of de facto disenfranchisement that prevented blacks from turning out to vote. Both historians and political scientists assume lynching to be the method through which the white population of the American South prevented political and social equality. Lynching is a form of ethnic violence, but there has not yet been a rigorous methodological examination of it as a potential form of political violence. In the following thesis I will examine the claims regarding the use of political violence within lynching in the southern United States. Under what circumstances would political violence be used or not be used in equilibrium? I begin with the assumption that lynching increases due to an impending election. Violence would be a function of the temporal proximity of a certain election. I will examine this claim using the dates of lynching and elections from 1880 to 1890. The second analysis of the paper examines whether or not political violence is due to factional politics. Violence would then be a function of the margin of the Republican or Democrat victory. The temptation to engage in political violence to manipulate election outcomes increases as the election draws closer. In this analysis, we examine the violence leading up to the election date with controls, including fixed effects (by state and county), census data and clustered standard error.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Political Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Menaster, Kimberly (Kimberly Ann)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• James Snyder.

• Political Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54604

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/54604