This is a study of the incidence of racial violence in five southern states in the 1980s, exploiting the archives of the Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR) to construct a data base. First, nonconfidential CDR data on incidents of racial violence and the public activities of white supremacist organizations will be coded into machine-readable form. Next, a county-level machine-readable file of demographic, economic, and political statistics on each county in the five state research region will be created, primarily using the 1980 and 1990 censuses. These files will be merged to permit examination of factors that may predict such violence in the 1980s: local economic conditions, racial and ethnic composition, activities of white supremacist organizations, rapid social change, historical patterns of anti-black violence. The research will test sociological theories of racial violence, thus contributing to scientific sociology in the fields of social movements, race relations, and group conflict. It will contribute to the knowledge base for policy decisions concerning racial conflict in contemporary American society, and indirectly it will help decision-makers understand the increasingly difficult problem of ethnic violence world-wide.
