Into "the Dead Zone" : racial violence and white supremacist genocide in Jim Crow Virginia, 1902-1951
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Among former Confederate states, Black Americans in Virginia experienced the fewest lynchings during Jim Crow segregation. Accordingly, after a spree of highly publicized lynchings during the late 1920s, Virginia Governor Harry F. Byrd and other state officials deemed lynchings a threat to the state’s economic development and reputation. Exemplifying this perceived distaste for racial violence, Byrd signed the nation’s first state-wide anti-lynching law in 1928. Within the historiography of the state, the law is frequently used to stress Virginia’s milder form of segregation compared to other southern states. This understanding fails to account for the state’s outsized and racialized system of state executions and the persistence of less visible acts of racial violence after the 1928 law. By adopting or continuing these practices, white Virginians preserved and made official white supremacist violence at the expense of Black social relations and citizenship. Using the archival papers of the NAACP and newspaper coverage, this thesis illustrates this maintenance of racial terror through state executions and impunity for individual perpetrators through a series of case studies. Examining these case studies using models from the field of genocide studies, this project ultimately argues for an understanding of Jim Crow-era racial violence as a part of a long-term white supremacist genocide in the United States.
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Introduction: Virginia's Anti-Lynching Law of 1928 -- Genocide as social practice, the genocide nexus, and the historiography of anti-black genocide -- The Readjusters, the Byrd Machine, and the reactionary making of Jim Crow Virginia -- Case studies in white supremacist violence: racial terror as social practice in Jim Crow Virginia, 1902-1951 -- Individual actors, police violence, and false imprisonment
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M.A. (Master of Arts)