Between Piney Woods and Cotton Fields: Tracing Racist Violence Through Family Networks of Northern Louisiana

FAIN: FEL-289729-23

Yevette Richards Jordan
George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)

Research and writing leading to a book that examines multigenerational family networks in early twentieth-century Louisiana, and their connection to broader racial dynamics and power structures in the United States.

My book project on Northern Louisiana is a regional study of how kinship networks were central to the production of systemic racist terror and the subsequent erasure of its memory. Through the investigation of a broad spectrum of racist violence from Reconstruction to the 1940s, my project reveals how white family networks functioned overtime and across multiple parishes to serve as both incubators of racist violence and shields of protection for the perpetrators within. The study began with an investigation into two unique and interconnected lynching cases within my own family network. Previous scholarship has not sufficiently explored the community ties and intimate relationships between victims and perpetrators, much less the multi-generational effects of racist violence and the lies told about it. This project fills in that gap.