Bibliographical Essay

As scholarly interest in violence surged in the wake of the civil rights era, histories of racial violence figured prominently. Richard Hofstadter, who edited American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), devoted the longest of the book's eight parts - as well as individual entries in most of the other sections - to racial violence.

Historians of the Reconstruction era took this premise to heart. See Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) and George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) for examples of this renewed emphasis on the ideology and tactics of racial violence. For more recent examples, see Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006) and Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For the role of violence in the rise ofJim Crow, see Timothy Tyson and David Cecelski (eds.), Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Steve Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Histories of racial violence outside of the South have also thrived in recent decades, with significant attention to Native American, Chinese and Mexican populations.

Studies of racial violence in the Jim Crow era are extensive. For surveys of lynching since Reconstruction, see Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002) and Michael James Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004). Pfeiffer has also edited collections on lynching outside of the South and mob violence around the world. See also state-level and comparative studies by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William Carrigan, Bruce Baker, Terrence Finnegan and Tameka Bradley Hobbs. For work on racial violence in the south-western borderlands, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Monica Martinez Munoz, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

For histories of resistance to racial violence, see Jacquelyn Dowd, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Like Williams, a surge of recent scholarship probes the intersection of racial and sexual violence from Reconstruction to the civil rights era. See Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2010).

Scholarship on racial violence and resistance from the civil rights era to the present is extensive, though violence is less prominent as a central theme. For works that focus extensively on racial violence, see David Chalmers, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013). For work on racial extremism in recent decades see Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).