As the South struggled to recover economically from the old plantation system, white anger grew and focused on Blacks communities.

African Americans were viewed suspiciously, and brutal, extrajudicial killings were used to control them and keep them in a state of fear and subjugation. Lynching became an especially horrendous tool used by the Ku Klux Klan and other white mobs as a way to instill fear and to ensure that Black people followed the racial segregation required by whites (Litwack, 2004). 

Historian Amy Wood wrote that “between 1880 and 1940, white mobs in the south killed at least 3,200 Black men” (Woods, 2009, p. 3.). While lynching occurred across the United States and against people other than Blacks, “most Americans at the turn of the century understood lynching as a Southern practice and as a form of racial violence that white mobs committed against African American men” (p. 4).