Prometheus 6

This article is fascinating.

The Legacy of Lynching: Part I
By Richard Morin
Sunday, September 25, 2005; Page B05

For decades, scholars have sought to answer this bloody question: Why has the murder rate been disproportionally high in the South for more than a century? Some argue it's the weather -- hot, steamy conditions setting tempers on edge and provoking deadly violence. Others blame widespread poverty and illiteracy. Still others fault a so-called southern "code of honor" that requires any slight to be avenged.

Now three sociologists have found an additional explanation: lynchings.

Some techincal flaw merged the end of an unrelated article on attractiveness to the end of this piece but some really interesting stuff was exposed before that happened.

Based on this information, Messner and his colleagues produced two maps. One showed homicides: Those counties with the highest rates were colored black; those with lower rates were shaded gray, while those with the lowest rates were white. The second displayed lynchings, using the same shadings. Counties with the most lynchings were colored black, those with a lower rate were gray and those with the lowest rates were white.

A quick glace at the maps revealed a chilling pattern. The dark areas roughly overlapped: the counties with the most lynchings had the highest homicide rates, while counties with fewer lynchings had comparatively fewer murders. The overlap wasn't perfect, but it was apparent even to the naked eye, Messner reported in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review.

A more sophisticated statistical analysis confirmed the relationship. Counties with the most lynchings had homicide levels roughly 5 percent higher on average than those counties with the fewest lynchings -- a correlation that didn't disappear when the researchers controlled for factors known to influence the murder rate, such as population, poverty, low levels of education, the percentage of young people in the population, the unemployment rate and the percentage of single-parent households. They even developed an elaborate method to account for the code of honor, and found that that the correlation remained strong.

Why would a brutal practice that began more than a century ago affect these same areas today? Messner isn't yet sure. "That's the million-dollar question. We see these analyses as the first word, not the last." He hopes others will join in searching for the reasons. But Messner is confident that "lynching seems to matter and is relevant to our understanding of contemporary lethal violence" in the South.

Is capital punishment the modern equivalent of lynching?

Yes, argue three researchers who found that the states that sentenced the most criminals to death also tended to be the ones with the most lynchings in the past.

Sociologist David Jacobs of Ohio State University and collaborators Jason T. Carmichael of Ohio State and Stephanie L. Kent of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas found that the number of death sentences for all criminals -- black and white -- was higher in states with a history of lynchings. But the link was particularly strong when they analyzed only death sentences for black defendants.

Wild. Especially in connection with things like this

Historians of the South, Brundage notes, took little interest in lynching until the late 1970s. By then they had been schooled by social historians to believe that collective action was not the result of "failed social control or exceptional social and psychological states" but of "ongoing political and economic contests present in all societies: violence is a by-product of `normal' collective action." The view that lynching was the act of well-integrated as well as poorly integrated individuals, and that it was an expression of long established relationships received an innovative jolt from Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's Revolt Against Chivalry. Moving closer to the meaning of social dramas such as lynching than previous scholars, Hall rooted the act in the patriarchal racial and gendered orders of the South to demonstrate how a complex public ritual could convey a broad range of meaning in one brutal event. The ritual reminded Southerners where each person fit into the racial, gendered, and otherwise classified hierarchy of community life. Sharing Hall's sensitivity to the sexual if not the gendered meanings of lynching, Joel Williamson teased out the psychosexual tensions released by economic insecurity and the shame evoked by fusing sex and failure in the dynamic conflicts of a changing culture. Bertram Wyatt Brown and Edward Ayers both delved into the culture of honor to explain collective white violence, but Ayers–like Williamson–reminded students to take account, too, of anxieties induced by an erratic economy.

I got a donation this weekend from one of the folks that came from Brad DeLong's place. I've decided to use part of it to get a copy of this article. I'm partly motivated by this guy...

I look forward to getting my hands on the study to find out more, because the Post’s description has me scratching my head about both its findings and its design.

For one thing, the Post report says that the study finds a 5 percent difference in current homicide rates between counties with high and low numbers of lynching in the past.  But 5 percent is a pretty small difference--especially when you consider that homicide rates today often vary 100 percent or more among different localities, and among different racial and ethnic groups. 

I also wonder about the decision to analyze data only from Southern states.  Lynching was a mostly but not exclusively Southern phenomenon during the 1882-1930 period, and what constituted a high level of lynching outside the South might qualify only as a low level within it.  [P6: ] Still, I suspect that many of those "low" lynching Southern counties have much higher rates of homicide today than much of the non-South; indeed, that inter-regional difference may well dwarf the difference between areas within the South.  All of which which would suggest that the historical incidence of lynching isn't really so important a variable.

But I’m basing these comments on a summary in a brief journalistic account, so it’s quite possible the authors discuss all this and more.  So hopefully, more on the subject soon.

Not like I'm going to follow up with him or anything. It was more what got me off the tipping point than anything else.

Revolt Against Chivalry author: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asin: 0231082835

Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries author: Orlando Patterson asin: 158243039X