UC Irvine

Research finds that historical racial violence helps to explain the spatial distribution of contemporary conflict, inequality, and violence in the U.S. Helping to narrow the historic gap in the legacy literature, this study applies a conflict theorist framework to an examination of the relationship between chattel slavery in 1860, lynchings of Black individuals between 1882 and 1930, and subsequent racial violence in the latter half of the 20th century. In particular, against the backdrop of conflict theory, I assess how these histories relate to racial violence enacted by police and other legal authorities during the Civil Rights Movement era that was intended to suppress and/or punish the pursuit or expression of the human and civil rights of Black individuals. I draw on a growing dataset of over 300 events of police violence that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement era in the sample state of Louisiana, and that was compiled from a number of primary and secondary source documents that were themselves culled from archival research conducted in Louisiana. Path analysis was then employed using negative binomial generalized structural equation modeling in order to assess the direct and indirect effects of these racially violent histories. The implications for social justice, public policy, and future research are also discussed.