Lynching concentrated in the South and punished black economic success

Evidence

“If you are looking for stolen black land,” Ray Winbush, director of Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute, told AP reporters, “just follow the lynching trail.” During the 1880s, 82 percent of all lynchings occurred in the South. By the 1920s, the rate increased to 95 percent. Most black Americans lived in the South after slavery ended, which meant lynchings were a message to black people to behave themselves and not get too uppity (read: too financially successful or too self-confident) if they did not want to get killed. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 306