2011/01/01 by Robert DeFina, Robert H. DeFina, Lance Hannon · 2 citations
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Homelessness and Social Issues #Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
paper · doi:10.1007/s12114-011-9089-z
crossref issued 2011/01/01 · crossref published 2011/01/01 · crossref published-online 2011/01/01 · crossref published-print 2011/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · crossref created 2011/03/31 · crossref deposited 2025/03/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Wacquant (2001) and others have argued that social control efforts directed at racial and ethnic minorities frequently shift institutional form and become more nuanced as societies modernize, even as the underlying function persists. This study examines the connection between southern lynching and housing segregation. We argue that legal, political, social and demographic changes in the south made lynching dysfunctional as a means of control. Among other more nuanced control mechanisms, modern housing segregation helped serve as a replacement. We test this proposition by relating historical southern black lynching rates to recent levels of segregation in southern MSAs. We find that an MSA's historical lynching rate is positively and significantly linked to the MSA's current segregation levels after accounting for standard determinants of segregation. Thus, segregation does not just occur generally throughout the south, but follows a very particular pattern based on past lynching rates. Our findings add to a growing literature on the legacy of lynching, such as studies examining contemporaneous variation in support for and use of capital punishment.