A Festival of Violence

Download or read book A Festival of Violence written by Stewart Emory Tolnay and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This finely detailed statistical study of lynching in ten southern states shows that economic and status concerns were at the heart of that violent practice. Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck empirically test competing explanations of the causes of lynching, using U.S. Census and historical voting data and a newly constructed inventory of southern lynch victims. Among their surprising findings: lynching responded to fluctuations in the price of cotton, decreasing in frequency when prices rose and increasing when they fell.