Lynching rose as Black people gained more civil rights.

Evidence

Robyn Wiegman has argued that lynching is a symbolic sexual encounter between the white mob and its victim. The castration is meant to evict Black men from the community of men. The threat that Black men represent is the threat of masculine sameness (here we could also say that the threat that the racial other represents is the threat of sameness and common humanity). Sameness must be disavowed and no more so than at the moment when it is too threatening a possibility, when, in other words, the racial hierarchy is revealed as a fiction. Weigman notes, as many other scholars do, that lynching increased and led more often to death when Black people gained more rights. (We might consider that racial violence in the policing or prison encounter in North America is often initiated when the prisoner talks back.) Sexualized violence accomplishes the eviction from humanity, and it does so as an eviction from masculinity. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 169

Categorization

• QUESTION: The counter-cyclical pattern — racial violence intensifying as equality advances — deserves further probing; what’s the mechanism and where else does it hold?
• XREF: connects to: Racial proximity that symbolized affection was a lynching catalyst for black men — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 603; New civil rights statutes drove a surge in federal discrimination filings. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 337; Jim Crow segregation extended even to the gallows and cemeteries — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2924