White vigilantes terrorized Southern black landowners to strip them of their farms

Evidence

At the turn of the twentieth century, a movement of white farmers known as the Whitecaps began terrorizing black farmers in the South. These white vigilantes, according to the historian George Wright, “were intent on driving blacks from their land and discouraging other blacks from acquiring it.” More often than not, their attacks on black farmers were aided by local law enforcement. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the Whitecaps used whatever methods were at their disposal, including intimidation tactics like nailing “notes with crudely drawn coffins to the doors of black landowners, warning them to leave or die.” Lynchings were often a part of whitecapping (designed to enforce white supremacy’s “community norms”), which became “a quick and easy way to illegally deprive Blacks of their land.” During the 1880s and ’90s, at least 239 whitecappings were recorded, with the largest number occurring in Mississippi. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘whitecapping’ as vigilante land theft against black farmers.
• XREF: connects to: Everyday harassment failing to force black homebuyers out escalated whites toward lethal violence. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 126