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This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of how South Africa and the United States of America, two countries with notorious histories of racial violence, attempted to formally deal with their violent pasts at roughly the same time. It then notes that, to date, no major comparative work has considered interpersonal violence as a distinctive component of the broad field of ‘racial repression’. By focusing on unofficial violence in the early stages of segregation in both countries, this study hopes to stimulate questions about a neglected phenomenon that tells us much about the development of distinctive forms and ‘styles’ of white supremacy.

In this chapter, the author presents a comparative study of two largely ignored black novels that focus on the suppressed presence of black women within the economy of racial violence. Looking at the work of Ida B. Wells, David Bryant Fulton, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, one can see that in some black writing on rape there was a self-conscious refiguration of domestic discourse that began from the point of rape's unspeakability rather than the violated black female body itself. The three focused on issues surrounding white violence. Wells' decision to become an anti-lynching activist was motivated by her own high sense of virtue and morality. Her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases mentions that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” As a tribute to Wells, Fulton's Hanover: or the Persecution of the Lowly (1900) retells the story of the 1898 Wilmington riot as seen and experienced by black women. Hopkins' Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) tenders a unique commentary on Fulton's idealized attempt to counteract the negation of black femininity within the context of racial violence. The literature discussed in this chapter uses the narration of black female experiences of white racial violence to problematize more general issues of black female self-construction and black communal conflict.

In the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, whites in South Africa pursued two strategies that distinguished state formation from the path followed in the USA: they constructed a centralized state, and authorized state officials to intervene extensively into the economy. In response to mounting pressure from employers and white workers, successive governments from 1910 onwards embarked on a campaign to modernize and boost the interventionist powers of the state. They did this chiefly by empowering the state to control the turbulent industrial arena and the field known as ‘Native Affairs’, both of which were still ambiguous and uncertain in the decade after 1910. The combined drift of these trends reinforced a state-oriented perspective within the white population generally. In South Africa, all roads led to the central state. Employers turned to the state to administer a labour-allocation system sufficiently flexible to meet their competing labour demands; white workers pressured the state to actively eliminate the ‘poor white problem’; and the segregationist state garnered greater powers for itself to modernize and strengthen the racial order. The early consolidation of a broadly statist ideology and the establishment of an interventionist state are central to the differentiae specificae of racial violence in South Africa: the absence of communal violence amidst high levels of private violence against blacks.

What impact did the legal system in South Africa have on racial violence? This chapter argues that the impact of the courts registered in two ways. Firstly, the paternalist sensibilities and a commitment to the ‘rule of law’ within the bench firmly shut the door on public and communal violence against blacks. Although the Supreme Court largely overlooked the lethal ‘pogrom’ that striking mine workers unleashed against innocent blacks during the 1922 strike, sentencing to death just one of the men who murdered innocent black bystanders, South Africa's legal system was strongly opposed to the quasi-legal ideology of ‘repressive justice’ which prevailed in the Southern states. Secondly, courts in South Africa were quite willing to accommodate private racial violence, which, whether in the form of serious assaults or murder, became an ingrained feature of race relations in South Africa.

This concluding chapter draws out a number of implications that flow from the preceding chapters. The first section explores the differential contribution of dominant actors to racial violence, drawing attention to certain structural conditions that either promote or constrain tendencies towards unofficial racial violence. The second section underscores the importance of a transcendent ideology and argues that systemic cultures of violence invoke predispositions which make reiterated violence not only acceptable but also righteous. A final section returns to the central role that the state played in the two cultures of violence.

The basic pattern of racial violence in the South was largely determined by the attempts of landowners and commercial farmers to gain mastery over a world turned upside down by the end of slavery. Emancipation raised two dire threats that struck at the heart of the former slave society: the emergence of a free market in labour and the plantocracy's lost grip over land. Landowners across the South mobilized against these twin threats, employing all mechanisms at their disposal to regain their former dominance. This chapter argues that landowners' quest for political and economic control forms the indispensable point of reference for any discussion of extra-legal racial violence, providing the terrain for even plebeian whites to participate in the lynch culture of the New South.

This chapter examines the crisis of black civic leadership in Chicago over its failure to stop whites’ violence against black citizens seeking housing in white neighborhoods. Housing-based racial violence, which coexisted with and reinforced the city’s slum clearance and public housing policy decisions, gives further credence to the view of black elites that a racial lens was the only legitimate one for analyzing and evaluating housing policy in the city and that racial democracy was the only legitimate political goal. The chapter then explores the growth of the militant approach to suppress racial violence, comparing it to the more moderate approaches of white-led race relations agencies and the cautious leaders of the National Urban League.

In Chapter 3 González-Tennant explores ways intersectionality helps explain the deep connections between past and present forms of racial violence. Intersectionality frames social inequality as the result of intersecting and uneven power relations. While intersectionality is central to critical race theory and Black feminism, its adoption by historical archaeologists remains limited. Intersectionality is useful for an archaeology of race riots because it provides a different lens for examining race and society. The perspective of intersectionality also speaks directly to more than a century of scholarship examining lynchings and race riots. A brief introduction to the literature demonstrates two alarming trends: the treatment of lynchings and race riots as separate phenomena and the inability or disinterest of previous research to satisfactorily connect past racial violence to modern social inequality. González-Tennant’s approach to researching the connections between past violence and modern inequality draws on works from a range of closely related disciplines to illuminate these connections.

Indoctrinated by their parents and the community to believe in white supremacy, many white children in the Jim Crow South saw incidents of racial violence as natural and inherent to the racial order of the times. They had come to accept that any violation of the dictates of segregation required punishment, primarily through physical brutality. Many children readily embraced their predetermined role in maintaining segregation as they matured, but there were others who, faced with the realities of racial violence, began to recognize the personal and social repercussions of the racial lessons they learned from an early age. Some of these children would later grow up to write their autobiographies, many pointing to a single traumatic event or several disturbing episodes of racial violence that changed their conceptions of self and racial identity and helped them to resist racial inequality. Children also played a central role in the campaign against lynchings. Images of white families involving their children in lynchings as part of their social ritual became a powerful propaganda tool for the antilynching movement, which sought to bring to national attention how white southerners perpetuate harm by exposing their children to what they viewed as horrific acts of violence.

This chapter reinterprets the Great Migration as a call to manhood for black men led by the Crisis and, in particular, the Chicago Defender. Their promotion of the migration along these lines gave rise to the modern black press, as well as the personal quests of W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the Crisis, and Robert Abbott, founder of the Defender, to achieve their own manhood through newspaper publishing. Yet, unlike DuBois, Abbott deployed sensationalism in order to amplify his paper’s particular call to manhood, politicizing and en-gendering the migration through riveting rhetoric that asserted that urbanity was the new maker and marker of manhood over the emasculating south’s older models of manhood connected to land ownership and self-produced commodities. The Defender’s construction of an urban-based black manhood helped set the tone for emerging New Negro sensibilities. Additionally, the Defender’s use of a gendered sensationalism helped establish black newspapers’ role in framing racial advancement within masculine terms throughout the twentieth century black freedom struggle.

Klan attacks took on distinct cultural forms. Ku-Klux borrowed their costume and violent performance not only from local culture, but also from popular cultural tropes in national circulation and heavily featured in minstrelsy, burlesque, circus, and carnivals. In deliberately mimicking these cultural forms, they put themselves in conversation with the northern, urban centers where so much of the naturally circulating popular culture was produced. Many of the images Ku-Klux borrowed were already weighted with a host of meanings about race, gender, and social order. Ku-Klux imported these meanings into their attacks, which they frequently used to reinforce racist cultural narratives: depicting black victims as comically overembodied and lacking in integrity. Klan victims responded not only to the violence of their attacks but also to the cultural meanings embedded in them. Depending on their circumstances and strategy, they could try to save themselves suffering by performing the minstrel roles they understood to be expected. Or they could refuse to inhabit those roles, and instead use the attack itself, and their later narration of it, to challenge the assumptions inherent in the popular cultural tropes the Ku-Klux were mobilizing.

This chapter examines the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee's (UFWOC) 1970 strike in the Salinas Valley and the various groups of UFWOC allies and detractors involved. It first considers the circumstances that led to the strike before discussing the strike in more detail. In particular, it analyzes the battle between Cesar Chavez's supporters, including farmworkers, and opponents as hundreds of incidents of violence erupted between the UFWOC and Teamsters Union during the strike's initial weeks. It also explores the various tactics employed by growers in response to the strike, the racial violence that erupted, the involvement of women such as Ethel Kennedy and Coretta Scott King, and the unprecedented cooperation seen between Mexican Americans and Mexicans.

Chapter four argues that emasculation was central to scientific and popular discourse on lynching as well as its practice. For three decades, prominent U.S. physicians recommended surgical castration as an alternative to lynch violence. They lent scientific support for the "black rapist" trope, but positioned themselves as progressive reformers offering a medical solution.

Journalists and political leaders outside Union County responded to and represented its violence, and how Union County elites controlled their violence would be understood and appropriated by outsiders. Labeling violence as “Ku-Klux,” and therefore as a fundamentally extra-local conflict, had powerful practical consequences: both Republicans and Democrats in Union County showed an initial reluctance to apply the label. By late 1870, however, both sides were deliberately using the term. Political leaders and the state and national press both showed great interest in Union events, sending a bizarre array of representatives from the outside, including detectives, gold miners, a couple dozen armed Bowery Boys, a former filibuster leader, and three U.S. Congressmen and their entourage, into the county to assess and intervene in events in the county.

‘The protection of our women’ became a prominent mantra of white politics in South Africa and the South in the postbellum period. Because economic, cultural and social relations in both racial orders were inseverably bound up with gender relations, significant changes in race relations simultaneously inflamed deep-seated anxieties concerning the security and status of white women. At the centre of these anxieties resided the black male as a sexual predator. Despite their different histories – one a recent slave society, the other a still-precarious settler colonial society – this mutual sexual stereotyping expressed the three-fold thrust of white male domination: to gain control over black males, retain access to black women and inoculate all white women at all times from the black-male-as-rapist. Focusing on the violence that rape myths inspired, this chapter shows that racial violence in South Africa and the South were conditioned by contrasting patterns of state formation in the aftermath of debilitating wars. It is organized into three sections dealing with the impact of rape scares on state formation. Each section demonstrates that whites in South Africa and the American South, although haunted by similar sexual fears, drew on different traditions and took different paths when the moment to act arrived.