Victims as Marginal Men?

Building on the preliminary descriptive evidence presented in Chapter 3, which provided an initial comparison of the characteristics of victims with those of a sample of black men who were not lynched, this chapter systematically examines whether black and mixed-race men who were outsiders or marginal in the counties where they were killed in some way were at greater risk than other men in their communities for falling prey to mob violence. This analysis is rooted largely in Roberta Senechal de la Roche's hypothesis about the sociogenesis of lynching, i.e. individuals with fewer social and economic ties to a community and who were accused of committing an offense against a white insider were at increased risk of victimization in part because they were able to marshal fewer friends and kin to come to their aid in times of crisis. The results offer partial support for the contention that socially marginal adult black and mixed-race males were exposed to a higher likelihood of being lynched than were their more socially embedded neighbors. Being a married head of a household also appears to have offered the greatest protection from lynching.