Contemporary Authors

• Lynched : The Victims of Southern Mob Violence ( With Stewart E. Tolnay) The University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2015

• Amy Kate Bailey Home Page - https://amykatebailey.com/

  I am an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, primarily teaching courses on research methodology and race. My research examines race and inequality, with two key areas of focus.

  The first examines the military, especially the interplay between individual and collective outcomes. This line of work examines a variety of questions, including the military’s effects on migration and population redistribution, the changing racialized dynamics between military employment and intergenerational mobility, and the links between community-level socioeconomic characteristics and military participation among young adults. As a faculty scholar at the Great Cities Institute at UIC’s College of Urban Planning & Public Policy (2015-2016), I began a project investigating how working class adolescents make decisions about the transition to adulthood, and the institutional and social resources they access during this process. Data collection is ongoing, including focus groups with adolescents and interviews with parents and youth serving professionals.

  The second focuses on historical patterns of racial violence in the American South, more commonly known as lynching. I am particularly interested in the characteristics of individuals who were targeted for victimization. My coauthored book on the characteristics of lynch victims is published by the University of North Carolina Press. I was also recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to build a database using the census records for individuals who were threatened with lynching.

  My prior work has been published in journals including the American Journal of Sociology, The American Sociological Review, Population Research and Policy Review, and Historical Methods.

• Publisher -

  Amy Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology. Dr. Bailey earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Washington in 2008. She spent two years as an NIH-funded postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, and joined the Utah State University faculty in 2010.
  Dr. Bailey’s research interests focus on race and social inequality. Her dissertation examined the effects of veteran status on social mobility and migration patterns among American men. Her current, related projects explore the role of veterans’ migration on redistribution of the U.S. population, and the distinct ways in which veteran status interacts with race and ethnicity to influence onward and return migration. With Devah Pager (Princeton University), she is researching the combined effects of enlistment and incarceration on communities with high rates of institutional sending.
  Dr. Bailey is also interested in historical patterns of lynching in the American South. With Stewart E. Tolnay (University of Washington) and E.M. Beck (University of Georgia), she created a database of the individual and family characteristics of lynch victims, using historical census enumerators’ manuscripts, and has a series of papers in process based on this work. With Karen Snedker (Seattle Pacific University), she is also researching the links between the local religious economy and racial violence.
  Dr. Bailey serves on the editorial board of Historical Methods, and regularly presents her research at national academic conferences.

• Department of Sociology, University of Illinois – Chicago Web site - https://soc.uic.edu/sociology/people/faculty/amy-bailey

  Amy Bailey
  Assistant Professor
  Research Interests:

  CV: Download CV

  Bio:
  Amy Bailey’s research examines race and inequality, with two key areas of focus. The first, which was the subject of her dissertation, examines the military, especially the interplay between individual and collective outcomes. This line of work examines a variety of questions, including the military's effects on migration and population redistribution, the changing racialized dynamics between military employment and intergenerational mobility, and the links between community-level socioeconomic characteristics and military participation among young adults. She is a 2015-16 Research Scholar at the Great Cities Institute, which supports her current project, “Transition to Adulthood for Working Class Youth: Institutions and Informal Practices in Local Communities.” This project conceptualizes joining the armed forces as one of many options available to young people, and seeks to understand how institutional and informal processes may contribute to local variation in social mobility regimes for working class youth.

  Her second area of research focuses on historical patterns of racial violence in the American South, more commonly known as lynching. She is particularly interested in the characteristics of individuals who were targeted for victimization, and with Stew Tolnay has written a book, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence, on the characteristics of lynch victims that was published in 2015 by the University of North Carolina Press. She currently holds a grant from the National Science Foundation to build a database using census records for individuals who were threatened with lynching or survived an attempted lynching.

  Bailey’s prior work has been published in journals including the American Journal of Sociology, The American Sociological Review, Population Research and Policy Review, and Historical Methods. She is a member of the Social Science History Association’s Publications Committee, and serves on the American Sociological Association’s Peace, War, and Social Conflict section’s administrative council. Bailey joined the UIC Department of Sociology as an assistant professor in the summer of 2013. She previously held positions as an NIH funded research fellow at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, and on the faculty at Utah State University. She earned a PhD and an MA in Sociology at the University of Washington, and holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Health from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

  CV: https://soc.uic.edu/docs/default-source/cvs/current-cv-bailey.pdf?sfvrsn=0

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: no2004058763

  Personal name heading:
  Bailey, Amy Kate

  Found in: Fertility and revolution, 2004: t.p. (Amy Kate Bailey)

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Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence
Bruce E. Baker
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p701.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:

Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. By Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xx], 276. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2087-9.)

Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck revolutionized the study of lynching twenty years ago by constructing a definitive list of lynchings to replace the flawed lists compiled by antilynching organizations. This data underlay a series of important articles and the book A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana, 1995). Now Tolnay and one of his Ph.D. graduates, Amy Kate Bailey, have used similar methods to compile a dataset of the victims of lynching. Many historians have done extensive research on a few victims as part of case studies of particular lynchings or more cursory research on a wide range of victims as part of statewide studies, but Bailey and Tolnay's work here is much more systematic and extensive than anything previously accomplished and should provide the basis for much further research.

An entire chapter is dedicated to a detailed explanation of how the authors compiled the data on the lynching victims. They began with the 2010 Beck-Tolnay Confirmed Inventory of Lynch Victims, which included data on the date, the county and state, the alleged offense, the name or names of the victims, their race, and their sex. Then Bailey and Tolnay connected this inventory to records in the U.S. census by a very precise process. In the end, they were able to link 935 of the more than 2,400 victims in the inventory with records from the last census before the person was lynched. While this number is only about a quarter of the victims of lynching between the 1880s and the 1930s, these findings represent a prodigious accomplishment.

Some of the conclusions Bailey and Tolnay reach reinforce ideas that historians have assumed to be the case, but several conclusions are new and surprising and paint a more complex portrait of the phenomenon of lynching and its victims. For example, one old debate centered on whether African American men who were marginal to their communities were more vulnerable to mob violence or whether black men who were successful drew the wrath of their white neighbors for that very success. Bailey and Tolnay effectively argue that both were true: as the Japanese proverb says, "the nail that sticks out shall be hammered down," and that appears to have been the case for poor, transient African Americans in more settled communities and for successful African Americans in poorer areas. Being well-off where more people were well-off, or rootless and new where most of one's neighbors were also new, offered some protection against being a victim of lynching.

While Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence is a huge step forward for understanding the people most directly affected by lynching, the study does have limitations, which are readily acknowledged by the authors. The most significant of these has to do with the famous fire in 1921 that burned up the 1890 census schedules. Since the peak of lynching happened in the early 1890s, this loss is particularly unfortunate because it means that Bailey and Tolnay must rely on the 1880 census to try to find lynching victims from the mid-1890s. The authors have managed to find only about 35 percent of the victims in the 1890s, while for other decades their success rate is between 40 and 50 percent. The other more puzzling limitation echoes Beck and Tolnay's earlier work: the study includes only ten southeastern states, omitting Virginia, Texas, and Missouri. While very few lynchings occurred in Virginia, this was certainly not the case in Texas. Perhaps ambitious students will expand Bailey and Tolnay's work to cover those states. Despite these limitations, it is still no exaggeration to say that Lynched is the single most important piece of scholarship yet produced on the victims of lynching.

BRUCE E. BAKER

Newcastle University

Baker, Bruce E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baker, Bruce E. "Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 701+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447794&it=r&asid=6aa9f1f52629c51be9cceb5190f9090f. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447794

• H-Net Reviews
  http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44360
  Word count: 907

  Amy Kate Bailey, Stewart E. Tolnay. Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Illustrations, tables. 296 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2087-9.

  Reviewed by William Carrigan (Rowan University)
  Published on H-Law (November, 2015)
  Commissioned by Michael J. Pfeifer

  The Victims of Southern Lynching

  In the two decades since the publication of Stewart E. Tolany and E. M. Beck’s A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 in 1995, numerous studies of lynching have appeared. Few are as important and significant as Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence, another study coauthored by Tolnay, this time with Amy Kate Bailey.

  As with the earlier study, Lynched is historical sociology whose foundation and value lies in the creation of a rich data set. The value of the data set in A Festival of Violence was that it was the most accurate inventory of lynching victims yet produced, superseding through rigorous fact checking those previously published by Tuskegee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Chicago Tribune. The data compiled for Lynched is not such a refinement but a completely new set of data. Bailey and Tolnay have created, for the first time, a set of data on the victims of mob violence. We now know much more about this largely unknown and forgotten group of individuals, including their ages, their families, their occupations, their ability to read and write, their states of birth, and much more.

  How did they create this inventory? In briefest terms, for Lynched, they searched through US census records for individuals confirmed to have been lynched, eventually linking data on over nine hundred lynching victims. Bailey and Tolnay do provide some analysis of white male and female victims in one chapter, but they focus overwhelmingly on African American male victims for the simple and justifiable reason that their numbers eclipsed those of all other groups in the ten southern states of their study. Their research took many, many years of painstaking hard work and was carried out by a large team of individuals, including over a dozen undergraduate research assistants, all properly credited in the preface. The authors detail the process by which the data set was created in chapter 2, but it is worth noting that it was the advent of online resources that was critical. In an age of federal spending cuts, I also want to note that the authors single out the support of the National Science Foundation.

  Many of the statistical details that populate the study are not surprising, but there is still great value to having a more precise portrait of the typical African American lynching victim in the American South. Bailey and Tolnay found that more than half of black male victims were married. They also note that the median age at time of lynching for black male victims was twenty-nine years. The youngest individual in their data set was eleven and the oldest was seventy-six. More than two-thirds were between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five when they were executed. The authors also note that most black male victims were lynched near where they grew up and were raised.

  The authors consider three different hypotheses in their analysis of their data: the possibility that black male lynching victims were from a lower social status than the average black male in the South; the possibility that black male lynching victims were from a higher social status; and the possibility that black male lynching victims were not statistically different in relation to social status.They find support for both of the first two hypotheses in their analysis but they find a way to reconcile their findings by comparing lynching victims not to the general black male population of the South but to the black male population in the counties that hosted their lynchings. This allows the authors to conclude that “the evidence suggests that standing out as an exception within the general African American population had an important influence on the targeting of lynch victims by southern mobs” (p. 147).

  Some of the key findings underlying this conclusion are the following. First, successful black men were MORE likely to be lynched IF they lived in areas with few successful black men. They were otherwise LESS likely to be lynched. Second, being identified in the US census as a “mulatto” reduced one’s risk of lynching but ONLY if one lived in an area with a high number of mixed-race peoples. Third, Being born out of state increased chances of one being lynched if that locality had few individuals born out of the state. Finally, Agricultural workers were more likely to be victimized by lynch mobs than nonagricultural workers but only if they lived in localities with low concentrations of black male agricultural workers.

  Historians will not find in Lynched new answers to some of their deepest questions about extralegal violence, namely, the underlying reasons that mobs executed their victims, but that is not grounds for criticism. There is much for historians to learn from these sociologists. In fact, there is much more in this volume than this review can cover, and I strongly recommend anyone with an interest in the history of racial violence and race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to read Lynched.