By the 1880s nearly 90 percent of all lynchings in the United States occurred in the southern states; most of the victims were black. In the last decade of the nineteenth century an average of 187 black men, women, and children were lynched every year; in contrast, there were an average of 130 legal executions per year in this period. Lynch mobs were motivated by a variety of factors. Some defended their conduct by claiming that the executed individuals had raped white women (the perception of the African American male as a sexual predator was common during this era). Many times white crowds took the law into their own hands in order to keep African Americans in their "place." F. B. Baker of Lake City, South Carolina, was lynched in the 1890s for accepting the office of town postmaster. Economic competition played a role in...