 Historians have noted that the peak of lynchings took place near the turn of the century, decades after Reconstruction ended, as whites were imposing Jim Crow laws and passing new state constitutions that disenfranchised the blacks.The lynchings were used for intimidation and social control, with a frequency associated more with economic stresses and the settlement of sharecropper accounts at the end of the season, than for any other reason.Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer (a Northern scholar) in 1917 explained