Whitecapping

Whitecapping was a violent vigilante movement of farmers in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was originally a ritualized form of extralegal actions to enforce community standards, appropriate behavior, and traditional rights. However, as it spread throughout the poorest areas of the rural South after the Civil War, white members operated from economically driven and anti-black biases. States passed laws against it, but whitecapping continued into the early 20th century. After it was institutionalized in 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." Whitecapping was associated historically with such insurgent groups as The Night Riders, Bald Knobbers, and the Ku Klux Klan. They 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 what they considered justice on the American frontier, 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 all were likely targets. As whitecapping spread into the Southern states during the 1890s after Reconstruction, a period of increasing racial violence against blacks by whites, the targets changed. In the South, White Cap societies were generally made up of poor-white farmers, frequently sharecroppers and small landowners, who operated to control black laborers and to prevent merchants from acquiring more land. In the South, Whitecaps tried to force victims to abandon their home or property.