Reflecting ideologies and institutions of white supremacy, racial violence not only targets blacks and ethnic minorities such as Jews but also other peoples of color. Violent conflict between whites and blacks, deep-rooted in slavery and segregation, has been persistent, as seen in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) and The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (2002), a documentary.

Slavery, the Civil War, and post-emancipation times were extremely violent. Slaves endured and resisted brutal treatment. Captured slave rebels were lynched on site or hanged after summary trials. Free blacks frequently suffered attacks, abduction, and enslavement. In New York City's draft riots (1863), white mobs, resentful of serving to free the slaves who could take their jobs, burned black neighborhoods, killing 105 blacks, before federal forces restored order. Black and white civilians often clashed in Union and Confederate states during the rest of the war; its end brought slavery's demise, northern Republican rule, and southern Conservatives’ (Democrats) reign of terror. Ex-confederate vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan whipped, intimidated, and murdered former slaves, many of them sharecroppers; northern missionaries; white and black Republican voters and officeholders. Black and white Republicans fought back but, despite some army protection and anti-Klan laws, Democrats reestablished “home rule” in 1877.

Southern whites then codified the Jim Crow system of segregation, disfranchisement, and terror that lasted into the 1960s. The black sharecropper or domestic who demanded fairness could face whipping, arrest, jail, or worse. Whitecapping, arson, gunfire, and sometimes murder, usually by white dirt farmers, drove out many black landowners. Lynching or illegal killing, which targeted blacks too, peaked circa 1880–1910, as Democrats and the Klan finally crushed a biracial opposition of Populists and Republicans, known as fusionists, and legally disfranchised black men. Tuskegee Institute recorded 4,730 lynching victims, 72.6 percent of them black, for 1882–1951. The peak year of 1892 saw 230 victims, including 69 whites.

Riots caused a deluge of casualties. At least 43 happened in the urban South, North, and Midwest (1898–1921), taking more than 750 black and 103 white lives. Many were injured. Rioting also marked the Depression and World War II era, 180 outbreaks in 1943 alone. Well-armed and aggressive, white rioters sought “a terrorization of massacre, and ... a magnified, or mass, lynching” (Myrdal, 1996, p. 566), one scholar writes.