Racial violence and segregation
Vigilante violence was critical in upholding the White supremacist order in the 20th century US. This research agenda aims to illuminate the relationship between racial progress and White supremacist terrorism, a dynamic with historical origins and modern consequences.Â
Unpacking the re-emergence of White supremacist groups: The case of the 1960s Ku Klux Klan
Why do White supremacists mobilize in some places and not others? I consider this question in the context of the Civil-Rights era South, wherein the Ku Klux Klan re-surged after decades of dormancy. Curiously, however, the KKK did not re-emerge everywhere in the South, but chiefly in North Carolina. In order to elucidate this particular puzzle and the broader forces driving White supremacist terrorism in the U.S., I leverage under-utilized data on North Carolina klan rallies from 1963-1967 and data on the number of klaverns per county in the 1960s. I implement a finite mixture model to evaluate three competing explanations of KKK activity: racial threat, generational klan legacies, and school desegregation. Previous research has focused primarily on racial threat as the explanation for klan activity, but I find that racial threat is only consistent with 36% of the data, while klan legacies and school desegregation are together consistent with almost two-thirds of the data. The results encourage scholars to reassess the historical and political correlates of White supremacist activity.