Whitecapping

Whitecapping was a violent lawless movement among farmers that occurred specifically in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was originally a ritualized form of enforcing community standards, appropriate behavior and traditional rights. However, as it spread throughout the poorest areas of the rural South after the Civil War, it took on distinct economically-driven and anti-black characteristics, eventually to be criminalized into state law. After its introduction to the formal law, its legal definition became more general than the specific movement itself: "Whitecapping is the crime of threatening a person with violence. Ordinarily, members of the minority groups are the victims of whitecapping." The movement or legal act of whitecapping is also associated with groups like The Night Riders, Bald Knobbers and the Ku Klux Klan who were known for committing "extralegal acts of violence targeting select groups, carried out by vigilantes under cover of night or disguise."

The Whitecapping movement started in Indiana around 1837, as white males began forming secret societies in order to attempt to deliver justice independent from the state. These groups became known as the "White Caps". The first White Cap operations generally aimed at those who went against a community's values. Men who neglected or abused their family, people who showed excessive laziness and women who had children out of wedlock are all prime examples of possible targets.

As whitecapping spread into the Southern states during the 1890s, the targets became drastically different. In the South, White Cap societies were generally made up of poor-white farmers, frequently sharecroppers and small landowners, who intended to control black laborers and to prevent merchants from acquiring more land. These societies in the South made it their task to attempt to force a person to abandon his home or property. This racial character of whitecapping in the South is thought to have been ignited by the postbellum agricultural depression that occurred immediately after slavery ended in the U.S., which involved issues with overproduction and falling crop prices. With attention centered on producing cotton, the South's economy became very unbalanced. Many farmers went into debt and lost their lands to merchants through mortgage foreclosures. The merchants and their black laborers and sometimes new white tenants became quick targets for the dispossessed, who seemed to be losing everything. Racism contributed to the problem as well, prosperous black men, or simply African Americans who acquired land in the South frequently faced resentment that could be expressed violently. Some cite the maintenance of white supremacy, particularly in the economy, after the freeing of slaves in the South as one of the main reasons White Cap groups formed.Mexican Americans have also been cited as victims of white capping, particularly in the state of Texas.

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