In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Jack Wippell, covers the new article by Joshua Byun and Hyunku Kwon, “Black Troops, White Rage, and Political Violence in the Postbellum American South.”
After the Civil War, the United States briefly stationed thousands of Union soldiers across the defeated South to protect the formerly enslaved and maintain public order. Joshua Byun and Hyunku Kwon ask a pointed question: did the character of that occupation — specifically whether the garrison was made up of Black or white troops — shape the wave of racist violence that followed once the army went home? They focus on lynching, the signature form of white-supremacist terror in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South, and examine whether communities that had been policed by Black soldiers nursed a special thirst for revenge once those soldiers disappeared.
To frame the problem, the authors revisit a classic debate over how best to pacify war-torn societies. A long line of counterinsurgency thought urges occupiers to “win hearts and minds” by using a light touch and handing power back to locals. More recent scholarship counters that brute force, not benevolence, often keeps violent majorities in check. Reconstruction provides a unique case to test a new expectation: Black soldiers embodied the complete inversion of the antebellum racial order, so removing them might embolden resentful whites rather than reconcile them. Indeed, the authors suggest that Black military occupation became a foundational trauma in white supremacist memory — retold, repurposed, and used to justify extralegal violence long after the troops had gone.
The study knits together two rich archives. One, the “Mapping Occupation” project, lists every federal garrison still active between 1865 and 1871 and records what share of its troops were Black. The other compiles every recorded lynching from 1880 through the 1930s. By merging the two datasets at the county level, Byun and Kwon compare places that lay within ten miles of a Black-troop post to otherwise similar places guarded by white soldiers or by no troops at all.
“For today’s policymakers, the story warns that short, symbolic interventions on behalf of oppressed groups can backfire unless outside forces are willing to stay long enough, and forcefully enough, to change local power structures for good.”A clear pattern emerges: once Washington withdrew the army in the early 1870s, the places that had hosted Black troops suffered a sharp and durable backlash. On average those counties experienced roughly a third more lynchings than comparable counties that never saw Black soldiers, and the risk grew the closer a community lay to a former Black garrison. Moreover, this penalty endured into the 1920s, a full half-century after the occupation ended. Thus, the apparent effect was not simply a flash of revenge; instead, the experience of occupation by Black troops cast a long shadow, embedding racial grievance into local political culture. By contrast, past white-troop presence had no lasting effect on local violence.
The lesson the authors draw is stark: military protection can shield vulnerable minorities while it is present, but a sudden hand-off to an antagonistic local majority may ignite rather than calm vengeance. In this sense, the federal government’s decision to wind down Reconstruction quickly, especially in counties where Black uniforms had upended the old racial script, helped incubate the long reign of Jim Crow terror. For today’s policymakers, the story warns that short, symbolic interventions on behalf of oppressed groups can backfire unless outside forces are willing to stay long enough, and forcefully enough, to change local power structures for good. Romantic talk of “local ownership” risks leaving the weakest citizens at the mercy of those who most resent their freedom.
- Jack Wippell is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. His research interests cover political sociology, social movements, and culture, and his current focus is on the emergence, spread and mobilization of far-right extremism across the United States and Europe. He also has interests at the intersection of computational and qualitative methodologies.
- BYUN, JOSHUA, and HYUNKU KWON. 2025. “Black Troops, White Rage, and Political Violence in the Postbellum American South.” American Political Science Review, 1–20.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.