Over the century that this racial caste system reigned, perceived violations of the racial order were met with brutal violence targeted at Black Americans—and **lynching was the weapon of choice**. Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in America and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. White mobs regularly used lynching and other forms of racial terror to enforce segregation and suppress African Americans’ attempts to claim equal rights.

Beyond the legal measures enacted to maintain White supremacy after slavery was abolished, violations of the perceived racial order were also met with extrajudicial violence, namely lynching. In the South these lynchings were acts of mob violence intended to maintain White supremacy, suppress civil rights, instill fear, and terrorize Black people. Our thesis is that they are because, we argue, both [Confederate monuments and lynching] represent resistance to Black progress and both share a purpose: to intimidate and terrorize Black Americans and uphold White supremacy.

After federal troops withdrew, racial terror lynchings by white mobs terrorized millions of Black people, and more than 4000 were killed between 1877 and 1950, mostly in the South. White Americans committed to the myth of Black inferiority used the law and violent terrorism to establish an apartheid society that relegated Black Americans to second-class citizenship and economic exploitation.

During this period, the political and legal gains won by African Americans during Reconstruction were dismantled, particularly by denying African Americans their voting rights and legalizing racial segregation, most notably in the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which made racial segregation legal until 1954. In addition to those suffering these political and legal injustices, thousands of African Americans were hanged, burned to death, shot to death, tortured, mutilated, and castrated by white mobs who almost never were prosecuted for their crimes. One of the main causes for this mass migration was the continuing racial violence, including lynching and racial massacres that targeted Southern Black people, as well as the return of the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist terrorist organization that first appeared shortly after the Civil War) around 1920.

Maintaining **segregation required violence, fear, and intimidation**. Physical violence, economic threats, psychological intimidation, and sexual exploitation were all used to control African Americans. After Reconstruction ended and federal troops left the South, **lynching was used to terrorize African Americans**. Victims were shot, hung, tortured, and burned at the stake. As part of a broader campaign of harassment and control, lynchings were often attended by families and community members. In 1865, six Confederate veterans organized the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Pulaski, Tennessee. Intent on re-establishing white dominance in the South, the Klan soon had chapters throughout the region. **Klansmen used violence as a tool to prevent African Americans from voting, running for office, or having economic success**.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK, the Klan), founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, was established as a direct response to the South's defeat in the Civil War. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan **targeted black freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including beatings, lynchings, and murder**. Blacks lived in fear of groups like the Klan who exerted reign of terror across the South where their crimes were rarely prosecuted. After WWII, the name Ku Klux Klan was used by numerous groups throughout the South who **opposed the civil rights movement and desegregation**. These groups used **cross burnings, beatings, bombings, and murder to intimidate civil rights activists and local black communities**.

White supremacists used violence, intimidation, and electoral fraud to suppress the votes of Black men, who mostly supported the Republican Party. Without federal intervention to protect Black civil rights, white supremacists reclaimed control of the South and passed laws creating the system of racial segregation and discrimination known as Jim Crow. African Americans who asserted their constitutional rights faced reprisals, threats, and the terror of the lynch mob.

A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice. Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South. These allegations [of rape and other crimes] were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors.

From 1868 through the early 1870s the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) **functioned as a loosely organized group of political and social terrorists**. The Klan’s goals included the political defeat of the Republican Party and the **maintenance of absolute white supremacy in response to newly gained civil and political rights by southern Blacks** after the Civil War. Most Klan action was designed to **intimidate Black voters and white supporters of the Republican Party**. Increasingly during 1868 these actions became violent, ranging from whippings of Black women perceived as insolent to the assassination of Republican leaders. Black churches and schools were burned, teachers were attacked, and freedpeople who refused to show proper deference were beaten and killed. A romanticized memory of the first KKK legitimated their activities and, combined with the growing power of a Lost Cause mythology, contributed greatly to Georgians’ acceptance of **vigilante violence and lynching** well into the twentieth century.

White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan—who often had the cooperation of the courts and the police—used violence and terror to strip African Americans of their rights and dignity. The fate of African Americans was gradually turned over to individual states, many of which adopted restrictive 'Jim Crow' laws that enforced segregation based on race and imposed measures aimed at keeping African Americans from voting booths.

Black Americans were also the victims of horrific violence perpetrated by white mobs and local authorities. White supremacists killed thousands of Blacks to intimidate them, prevent them from voting, and stop them from exercising their rights. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups such as the White League were organized to terrorize Blacks and keep them in a constant state of fear.

This chapter will discuss the various forms of **racial terror, such as lynching, mob violence, and sexual violence**. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists beat, burned, and killed African Americans. In order to re-exert control over the African American labor force and **maintain white supremacy**, the KKK used fear tactics and violence, such as robbery, rape, arson, and murder. The KKK was effective at **targeting its violence and intimidation tactics at African American voters, including hanging and beating African American officeholders**. The KKK was able to commit **lynchings in front of a public audience and leave bodies on display—all without intervention by law enforcement**.

While Black Americans were struggling with the divide between freedom and equality, they also increasingly became the targets of violence by some White people. Black families were attacked, and some were forced from their land; Black schools and churches were burned, and many African Americans were the victims of beatings and murders. Between 1882 and 1968, at least 3,446 African Americans were lynched in the United States, with the majority of the murders taking place in the South. The violence and terror were meant to reinforce the racial caste system that had been in place before the Civil War. Much of this violence was carried out by White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secret organization formed in 1865 to terrorize Black Americans.

At the end of the American Civil War, Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan to resist Reconstruction. The group incited riots and assaulted and murdered Black people and Republicans (the party of Lincoln, and of emancipation) to intimidate voters and influence elections. In line with their founding ambitions, the Ku Klux Klan attacked and killed both Black and white people who were seeking to enfranchise the African American population. Chicago white racists were notorious for bombing Black homes on the "wrong side" of the city's racial boundaries. They attacked hundreds of homes to keep African American homeowners in the ghetto.

Violence was also utilized to control and recreate pre-Civil War social structures instigated by white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The group’s goal was to weaken African Americans’ political power and to recreate the stratified social structure that existed before the Civil War. A common control tactic was publicly lynching African Americans.

After the Civil War there was a period of time, from about 1865 to 1877, where new federal laws were enacted that both created and protected civil rights for formerly enslaved and free black Americans. …In addition to racist and discriminatory legislation, intimidation tactics and political violence were used to stop black men from voting. Moreover, white supremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, were established in the south at the end of Reconstruction. These groups used acts of terrorism, such as lynching, to discourage and prevent black men and women from exercising any of their civil rights, and diminished their ability to freely move, act, and participate in society. Jim Crow laws created and enforced racial segregated public facilities, from schools and bathrooms to movie theaters and laundromats, across the southern United States.

Violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness enabled white Southerners to create a regime of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement alongside a new economic order that continued to exploit Black labor. Between 1865 and 1877, thousands of Black women, men, and children were killed, attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution. Emboldened Confederate veterans and former enslavers organized a reign of terror that effectively nullified constitutional amendments designed to provide Black people equal protection and the right to vote. In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative issued a new report that detailed over 4,400 documented racial terror lynchings of Black people in America between 1877 and 1950…We now report that during the 12-year period of Reconstruction at least 2,000 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynchings.

The fear of black men raping white women became a public rationalization for the lynching of black people. Lynching is the illegal, often public, killing of an accused person by a mob. The great majority of lynchings occurred in southern and border states, where the resentment against black people ran deepest. The KKK as Terrorists: Ku Klux Klan members have harassed, beaten, lynched, and bombed black Americans.

For Herndon and his comrades, the arrest and prosecution of Willie Peterson marked the culmination of this broader campaign of violence and intimidation. "Lynching and mob violence are only methods of economic repression"

As the influenza pandemic of 1918 began to subside, U.S. cities in 1919 saw an explosion of racial violence frequently described as “race riots,” “Negro riots” or “race wars.” While the White press often reported these events as resulting from Black-on-White violence or Black “insurrection” and socialism, such incidents of mob violence are better understood as white supremacist terrorism, pogroms and lynchings. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented massacres, lynchings and other forms of racist violence during Reconstruction and beyond as tools of white supremacist terror.

The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Black people who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings… Lynching served many purposes… it was a method of defending white domination and helped stop or retard the fledgling social equality movement. Instead, in the spirit of pogroms, the mobs went into black communities and destroyed additional lives and property… the larger goal was to maintain, at all costs, white supremacy.

Neighborhood children raiding an African American family's house after they were forced out during the 1919 Chicago Race Riots. Lynchings increased from 64 in 1918 to 83 in 1919. Most violent incidents during the Red Summer of 1919 were not initiated by fringe white supremacist terror groups. Ordinary white civilians and veterans, unaffiliated with the Ku Klux Klan or any other racist organization, formed most of the mobs. We know that hundreds of people lost their lives, thousands were injured and many more were forced to flee their homes during the race riots and lynchings of the Red Summer of 1919.

The authors situate lynching in the context of racist violence, noting that white supremacist groups and communities used **intimidation tactics like performing public lynchings** to maintain racial hierarchies. The paper references historical work (History.com, 2009) on the **founding of the Ku Klux Klan** and its use of terror, including lynching, against African Americans in the post–Civil War South. It examines how historical lynching, as a form of racial terror, continues to have measurable impacts on biological and cognitive health outcomes among African Americans.

Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures as violent insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, White League, and Red Shirts disrupted Republican organizing, ran Republican officeholders out of town, and lynched black voters as an intimidation tactic to suppress the black vote. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.

Jim Crow is the common name used to describe the racial segregation and disfranchisement inflicted upon African Americans in the postbellum South. Jim Crow restrictions and laws became popular in the south during the post-Reconstruction era and continued well into the 20th century.

EJI’s new report, Reconstruction in America, documents nearly 2,000 more confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs in America than previously detailed. The report examines the 12 years following the Civil War when lawlessness and violence perpetrated by white leaders created an American future of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws. Violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness enabled white Southerners to create a regime of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement.

The Black Codes laid the foundation for the system of laws and customs supporting a system of white supremacy that would be known as Jim Crow. The majority of states and local communities passed “Jim Crow” laws that mandated “separate but equal” status for African Americans. In theory, it was to create “separate but equal” treatment, but in practice Jim Crow Laws condemned black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities. Jim Crow Laws were statutes and ordinances established between 1874 and 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American South.

Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South. Lynchings often involved torture, mutilation, and murder, and were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy.

Then, with the radical Reconstruction, you get political violence. You get organized groups — the Ku Klux Klan and others, like the White League in Louisiana, the Knights of the White Camelia — whose purpose is to obstruct and destroy Reconstruction government, to assassinate or intimidate black and white Republican officials, to use violence to prevent people from voting. These were sadistic tortures… the intention of which was… to stop these people from engaging in politics, to stop these people from trying to be independent economic actors, to stop these people from trying to get educated, from trying to be citizens. This was a war of terror, aimed at not only the suppression of black voters and black politicos, but also at whites deemed to be "race traitors."

Historians widely document that in the United States after Reconstruction, white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, along with informal white mobs, used lynching, riots, and everyday intimidation to enforce racial segregation and suppress African Americans’ efforts to claim civil and political rights. These practices, including public spectacles of violence and community-sanctioned terror, were part of a broader system designed to maintain a racial hierarchy and discourage challenges to white dominance. Modern scholarship treats this violence as central to the maintenance of Jim Crow segregation and the thwarting of Black civil rights movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.