October 2, 2016 at 3:30 pm

Economics Seminar | Segregation and Southern Lynching, Nov. 4

The Economics Seminar series presents Dr. Trevon Logan, of Ohio State University, on Nov. 4 at 3 p.m. in the Bentley 124.

Dr. Trevon Logan

Logan will discuss “Segregation and Southern Lynching.” He is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio State.

Abstract: The empirical relationship between racial segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain implicit hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with more general theories of social conflict. Since Southern lynching occurred in rural and urban areas, traditional urban measures of racial segregation cannot be used to estimate the relationship. Earlier analysis has analyzed the relationship between lynching and racial proportions, a poor proxy for racial segregation. We use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation (Logan and Parman 2015) which can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition to estimate the correlation between racial segregation and lynching in the southern counties of the United States. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated counties were much more likely to experience lynchings. Consistent with the hypothesis that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching, but uncorrelated with white lynching. These results call for reformulating theories of Southern lynching, the use of lynching as a proxy for violence in general, and the effects of social interactions and interracial proximity in rural areas.