E. M. Beck

The study of the epidemic of mob violence that characterized the South for five decades, between 1880 and 1930, demonstrates that when an ideology of racial superiority is combined with the proper mix of social, economic, and political factors, a volatile condition is produced that can easily erupt in mob violence. The frequency of lynch law "justice" declined as the need to control the South's African American population diminished and as state and local governments begin to actively protect the civil liberties of the Black population. The two most important lessons to be learned are: (a) the immense power that a racialized ideology can hold over a people, and (b) the critical role of the state in guiding and protecting the rights of its citizens. Those are lesson that are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

E. M. Beck, professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, is a Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor. He has been at the University of Georgia since 1976 and received a Ph.D.in Sociology from the University of Tennessee in 1972. His speciality areas include race discrimination and racial violence, poverty and inequality; sociology of labor markets, industrial sociology; qualitative methods and statistics, simultaneous equations models bayesian estimation and inference. Dr. Beck's current research involves the relationship between social and economic inequalities and violence toward blacks in the American South.