Organized Vigilantism: Klaverns and Lynching in Early 20th-Century America

• In Event: Historical Legacies of Violence in Democracies

Abstract

To what extent did the spread of Ku Klux Klan outposts ("klaverns") facilitate extralegal violence in the early 20th century U.S.? While civil society groups have been shown to abate ethnic violence when their memberships bridge otherwise conflictual groups, they are also known to exacerbate such violence when comprised of exclusive ethnic or identity-based memberships. Recent datasets have illustrated the scope of both lynchings and Ku Klux Klan branches in the American post-Reconstruction period, but little attempt has been made to understand the spatial and temporal relationships between documented lynchings and the organizational growth of the Second Klan in the early 20th-century. This paper provides the first such quantitative study, leveraging the most comprehensive datasets on Ku Klux Klan “klaverns” and documented U.S. lynchings. A series of spatiotemporal regression models are used to evaluate the effect of klavern concentration and county-level lynching deaths in the U.S., supplemented by qualitative materials.

Author

• Connor Staggs, Brown University