Outside of the violence inherent in slavery, the prison system, and other such institutions, racial violence in Arkansas tends to fall into four overlapping categories: lynching, race riots, nightriding/whitecapping, and racial cleansing.

The first lynching occurred in Arkansas in August 1836, about two months after Arkansas formally became a state. A man named Bunch, apparently a free black man in Chicot County, attempted to vote and reportedly assaulted a white man when denied this opportunity. Locals hanged him in response. Several slaves were also lynched during the antebellum years, typically for attempted escape, murder of slave-owners, or other forms of resistance. During Reconstruction, black political and economic life flourished, but these trends were reversed during the 1880s and 1890s. Likewise, lynching increased during these years and became more explicitly racialized. Too, lynching by mass mobs numbering in the hundreds or thousands also became more common in the 1890s and early 1900s. Such mobs burned Ed Coy alive in Texarkana in 1892, shot Wade Thomas to death in Jonesboro in 1920, and dragged John Carter’s lifeless body through the streets of Little Rock in 1927. Depending upon the definition of lynching employed, the deadliest mass lynching in America may have occurred in March 1904 in St. Charles, Arkansas, where thirteen African Americans were killed over three days. The last lynching in the state happened on April 29, 1936, when Willie Kees was murdered in Poinsett County. Approximately 365 lynchings occurred during this century of Arkansas history.

Many mass mob lynchings easily fall into the category of race riots, too, although race riots differ in that the target is not a specific person or specific people but, instead, an entire community. Along the Howard and Hempstead County line in 1883, a boundary dispute between two black farmers and one white sharecropper turned violent, and rumors swiftly spread among whites that African Americans were leading an insurrection. In response, hastily formed white posses attacked black merchants and farmers. Political tensions among black Republicans and white Democrats (the latter eager to regain power following Reconstruction) resulted in riots in Crittenden County in 1888 and St. Francis County the following year, by which whites solidified their hold on power. Economics, too, could provide the catalyst for anti-black violence. An attempted strike by black cotton pickers in Lee County in 1891 was ruthlessly suppressed by local white authorities, who murdered a number of the strikers, setting a bloody precedent for the Elaine Massacre of 1919.