Book Displays: Equal Justice Initiative 2023: Web Resources

Research finds that historical anti-Black violence helps to explain the spatial distribution of contemporary conflict, inequality, and violence in the U.S. Building on this research, the current study examined the spatial relationship between chattel slavery in 1860, lynchings of Black individuals between 1882 and 1930, and anti-Black violence during the Civil Rights Movement era in which police or other legal authorities were implicated.

Capital punishment in the United States is racialized: those convicted of the murder of Whites are much more likely to receive the death penalty than those convicted for the murder of Blacks. Capital punishment is more commonly practiced in places where lynching of Blacks occurred more frequently and in states in which slavery was legal as of 1860. Accordingly, scholars have debated whether capital punishment reflects a legacy of lynching or a legacy of slavery. Our analysis shows that lynching on its own is a significant predictor of contemporary executions, but that once slavery is accounted for, slavery predicts executions, while lynching does not. We argue that slavery’s state-level institutional legacy is central to contemporary capital punishment.

The present work interrogates the history of Confederate memorializations by examining the relationship between these memorializations and lynching, an explicitly racist act of violence.

This article, adapted from the author’s 2009 book, examines the forces that gave rise to lynching spectacles and the cultural work those spectacles performed.