Vigilante Violence Research Articles

Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and Death Sentences

Capital punishment is the most severe punishment, yet little is known about the social conditions that lead to death sentences. Racial threat explanations imply that this sanction will be imposed more often in jurisdictions with larger minority populations, but some scholars suggest that a tradition of vigilante violence leads to increased death sentences. This study tests the combined explanatory power of both accounts by assessing statistical interactions between past lynchings and the recent percentage of African Americans after political conditions and other plausible effects are held constant. Findings from count models based on different samples, data, and estimators suggest that racial threat and lynchings combine to produce increased death sentences, but the presence of liberal political values explains the absence of death sentences. These findings both confirm and refine the political version of conflict theory because they suggest that the effects of current racial threat and past vigilantism largely directed against newly freed slaves jointly contribute to current lethal but legal reactions to racial threat.

The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement

In 1964, a small group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana, formed an armed self-defense organization to protect movement workers from vigilante and police violence. Lance Hill offers the first detailed history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, who grew to several hundred members and twenty-one chapters in the Deep South, and led some of the most successful local campaigns in the civil rights movement. He constructs a compelling historical narrative of a working-class armed self-defense movement that defied the entrenched nonviolent leadership and played a crucial role in compelling the federal government to neutralize the Ku Klux Klan and uphold civil rights and liberties.

To Ensure Domestic Tranquility: The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and Political Discourse, 1964–1971

Between September 1964 and April 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. While historians are quite familiar with the FBI's efforts to nurture anticommunism and to discredit civil rights and leftist movements, the FBI's role in discrediting KKK groups in the American South during the late 1960s has not been systematically assessed. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three-pronged attack. It describes how the FBI secretly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, provided discretely by the FBI to liberal Southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white Southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank-and-file Klan members. FBI agents and their clandestine informants circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.

Violent Youth Groups in Indonesia: The Cases of Yogyakarta and Nusa Tenggara Barat

Problems of violent youth groups have escalated in Indonesia, following economic recession, unemployment, and weakened state institutions. Young people have been hit by the lack of income and broken expectations. In consequence, youth groups emerge and arrange for members' economic revenue as well as identity creation and confidence. Religion in some cases is used to legitimize violence and to strengthen the boldness of group members. The paper offers a brief overview of gangster (preman) traditions in Indonesia. Empirical findings on violent youth groups in the two selected provinces are presented within a multi-factor analytical framework, where the need for income and identity strengthening, political élite interests, and the lack of law enforcement contribute to explaining criminal and vigilante violence. Interviews with leaders and members of movements engaged in violent actions offer insights into a problem that threatens national security and control.

"In our own hands": Lynching, justice, and the law in Bolivia

Vigilantes in the marginal communities of a Bolivian city take the law into their own hands both to police their communities against crime and as a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the state and its official policing and justice systems. In this article, I examine an incident of vigilante violence (lynching) in one such Bolivian barrio to explore the ways in which vigilantism acts as a moral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process. I also analyze the range of discourses that surrounds lynching in contemporary Bolivian society, exploring the interpretive conflict that results as barrio residents attempt to counter official representations of the meaning of vigilantism in their community. [violence, vigilantism, legal anthropology, citizenship, Bolivia, the Andes]

Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80

Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans down meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching.Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' extralegal violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts. Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism.

Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. By Clyde Woods. The Haymarket Series. (London and New York: Verso, 1998. Pp. x, 342. $22.00, ISBN 1-85984-811-7.) In this sweeping political, cultural, and economic survey of the Mississippi Delta region from slavery to the present, author Clyde Woods outlines in painstaking detail the story of a brutally repressive and frighteningly resilient plantation regime and tells the symbiotic story of black resistance manifested lyrically in the counter-narrative of the Mississippi blues tradition. Although Woods's study begins during slavery and Reconstruction and ends in the 1990s with the: 1990 Delta Pride catfish workers strike and the 1993 appointment of Mississippi's Mike Espy as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, it is the middle section of his text that is most insightful. Woods contests the standard interpretation of the so-called enclosure movement--a set of policies ostensibly devised to stabilize and modernize the southern economy in the wake of the devastating Mississippi flood of 1927 and the onset of the Great Depression. The movement was embodied in the Agricultural Adjustment Act and, according to Woods, it was the one pivotal development that transformed the state's plantation economy. In his view: [t]he enclosure movement in the Delta was not ... based on the transition of feudalism into capitalism; rather it marked the movement from capital-scarce, labor-intensive plantation to capital-intensive, labor-surplus neo-plantation production (p. 127). This allowed greater concentration of land ownership and wealth and greater control and domination of labor. Woods notes that Works Progress Administration (WPA) practices perpetuated racial inequality by allowing dual pay scales, with blacks paid less than white workers. These oppressive conditions were bolstered by white vigilante violence and a brutal prison system. Woods shifts his attention to the post-World War II period to offer a rigorous critique of what he terms the Green Revolution, an economic and structural reconfiguration of Mississippi's plantation system involving mechanization, crop diversification, and new agricultural techniques. Various labor-saving devices, coupled with a resurgence of white supremacist violence designed forcibly to evict surplus black tenant farmers from the land, resulted in a new plantation regime. Although southern-based white supremacists like the White Citizens Councils are among the main culprits in forging the neo-plantations of Mississippi, Woods also indicts the U. …

Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado (review)

248CIVIL WAR HISTORY African American freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also saw the Fifteenth Amendment as a mechanism for combating the influence of the Democratic party in national politics and eliminating political corruption. Between 1870 and 1873, Congress passed legislation giving the federal government the power to enforce theAmendment and to suppress antisuffrage violence. Protection of black suffrage continued into the 1 880s and provided the Republican party with a power base solid enough to guarantee its success in state and national elections and its control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. As national support for protecting the rights ofAfrican Americans waned in the 1 870s and 1 880s, factions within the Republican party found it increasingly difficult to agree on policies that could unify the party on this issue and to negotiate from a position of strength with their rivals. Wang argues that the party's policies were always the result of internal compromises that, although creating a working basis for the operation of the party, failed to eliminate factionalism within the party. It was the breakdown of consensus politics that led the party to abandon suffrage as the central focus of its political agenda; and the decline in the party's commitment accounted, in part, for the eventual disfranchisement of southern blacks. The Trial ofDemocracy is extensively researched and well written. Wang utilizes published and unpublished government documents as well as diaries, letters, and personal papers to synthesize the debate between Republican liberals , conservatives, and moderates and their opponents over the suffrage and enforcement issues. However, because Wang centers his work in the national political arena, women, African Americans, and immigrants remain on the periphery of the action. There is little sense of the human drama at work in the Reconstruction South as recently enfranchised freedmen and their disfranchised former owners struggled to determine their political roles in the New South. The value of Wang's work, however, lies in its depiction of a political party struggling to hold together diverse factions and to develop a coherent consensus on a critical issue of national politics in the late nineteenth century. He takes the suffrage debates beyond the dynamic of racial politics to the issues of constitutional interpretation of states' rights and the proper role offederal authority in the election process. This book is a valuable addition to resources on American political history in the late nineteenth century. Beverly Greene Bond University of Memphis Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado. By Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi, 190. $34.95.) In an introduction the authors explain that most popular writers have described Cullen Baker from a Dunning school view as an ex-Confederate Robin Hood BOOK REVIEWS249 figure who opposed Reconstruction changes in Northeast Texas and Southwest Arkansas. Popular writers of western history or novels have portrayed Baker as the first fast-draw frontier gunfighter. Generally such writings relied primarily on oral recollections and folklore. In recent years historians have researched the documents of the period to offer more critical assessments of Baker as a bandit or guerrilla. This volume represents a detailed effort to compare folklore and fact in a search for the elusive reality of Baker's life. Baker came fromTennessee toTexas with his family, which owned no slaves. Feuds and vigilante violence existed in EastTexas, although the impact on Baker remains vague. Folklore suggests an inclination toward fighting and drinking in his youth, which led to mental instability from a blow to the head. Despite marriage in 1854, he committed assaults and murders, fleeing to relatives in Central Arkansas and later back to Texas. During the Civil War he joined and apparently deserted the Confederate army and remarried. Folklore suggests he worked briefly for the Union army, acted as a guerrilla, and began to hate and kill African Americans late in the war. After the war and the death of Baker's second wife, her sister rejected him in favor of schoolteacher Thomas Orr. Baker attacked Orr and began to engage in theft and murder of other Anglos. In 1 867 he gathered an outlaw band that fluctuated in...

The Collaborator's Penance: The Local Purge, 1944–5

Despite the neat treaties of diplomats and precise agreements of generals, wars like the Second World War end untidily. Amidst the ruins of cities and the wash of refugees, the cessation of international hostilities gives way to the settling of domestic accounts, which in 1944–5 was called the purge of collaborators. As common and as compelling as the purge was, historians have paid relatively little attention to it. The French purge, for instance, remains somewhat of an historical enigma, in part because of the archival laws that shield the judicial records, but also in part because of the apparently obvious nature of the purge. Who cannot sympathise, even if reluctantly, with the bereaved survivors who took vengeance on the collaborator who murdered their husbands or wives, fathers, daughters or beloved friends? But such easy sympathy has misled scholarly analysis into dividing the French purge into a legal purge of court action and a popular purge of vigilante violence.

Countertransference in Trauma Work in South Africa: For Better or Worse

Working with victims of political violence evokes strong countertransference reactions in mental health workers. Professionals and lay counsellors alike comment on the intensely demanding, stressful and sometimes invigorating nature of this work. Despite these acknowledgements, however, there is a dearth of literature on the countertransference experiences of therapists engaged in trauma work. This gap is especially pronounced in the available literature on trauma work in South Africa. In this paper the author considers some of the reasons for this omission and then presents the results of interviews with 20 therapists engaged in work with individuals traumatized by political violence (i.e. former detainees and refugees from vigilante violence). Specific countertransference themes are identified and discussed.

Vigilantism as community social control: Developing a quantitative criminological model

This paper presents the first systematic quantitative examination of participation in vigilante behavior. Data collected as part of a larger study of Jewish settler violence in the Israeli-controlled West Bank region are used to analyze the factors that lead members of a community to become involved in vigilante violence. Using logistic regression techniques it is found that settlers who fulfill requirements of the vigilante role and those located in outposts where the demand for vigilantes is greatest are most likely to be involved in vigilante activities. In conclusion, it is argued that these findings provide strong support for a criminological model of vigilante behavior that emphasizes the role of the vigilante as an agent of community social control.

The phenomenology of vigilantism in contemporary America: An interpretation

Vigilante violence is studied, defined, and delineated from a phenomenological stance. An interpretation of American vigilantism is developed: violence is intended by the perpetrators to maintain and defend, rather than change, the established sociopolitical order. Four major types of vigilantism are discussed: (1) private, spontaneous vigilantism; 2) private, organized vigilantism; (3) official, spontaneous vigilantism; and (4) official, organized vigilantism. The main objective of vigilantism is the preservation of social stability in the face of innovative behavior. It is often a reaction to the widening range of officially tolerated innovation and the existence of state‐sponsored innovation. Besides a study of the typification of motivation, the article deals with the vigilante personality.