There is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South. Her white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or redress therefore in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him.

The result is a growing disregard of human life. Lynch law has spread its insidious influence till men in New York State, Pennsylvania and on the free Western plains feel they can take the law in their own hands with impunity, especially where an Afro-American is concerned. The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperiled.

–"Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,”
Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
1892

In her investigations of widespread lynchings in the South, Ida B. Wells-Barnett discredited the arguments that lynchings were the result of

interracial rap.
consensual interracial relationships.
economic competition.
labor disputes.