Narratives for Racial Violence in the Postbellum South

Abstract: We study how narratives for racial violence develop and persist in the postbellum US South, where racial mixing was socially taboo and legally prohibited. We posit that after the Civil War, social anxiety about racial mixing is heightened in places with more missing white men, lowering the cost of violence accompanied by narratives that depict Black men as sexual predators. We test this prediction by constructing a novel database of lynchings, which we combine with publicly available information to form a comprehensive dataset of anti-Black violence from 1865-1930. We find that from 1865 to 1880, the probability of a lynching for a sexual offense is 37 percent higher in counties that experienced the average shock to white male casualties. The effect persists and is exacerbated in times of economic downturn. We perform a series of robustness checks, which confirm that the results are not confounded by crime, migration, or other economic impacts of the war. Our findings have important implications for understanding how narratives for racial violence develop and persist, and further elucidate the prevalence of social anxiety around Black male sexuality in the postbellum US, a sentiment that endures today.