racial terror

Racial terror is violence, intimidation, or threat of harm directed at people because of their race, designed to maintain dominance and suppress resistance.

The term often describes systematic campaigns rather than isolated acts: lynchings, bombings, cross burnings, and mob attacks that enforced white supremacy in the American South.

The museum documents a century of racial terror against Black communities.

The phrase emphasizes that such violence served political and social purposes beyond individual hatred.