The Making of a Lynching CultureHow a culture of violence legitimized lynching among ordinary people On May 15, 1916, a crowd of fifteen thousand witnessed the lynching of an eighteen year old black farm worker named Jesse Washington. Most central Texans of the time failed to call for the punishment of the mobs leaders. In The Making of a Lynching Culture, now in paperback, William D. Carrigan seeks to explain not how a fiendish mob could lynch one man but how a culture of violence