BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY “Lynching”
Background and Summary
“Lynch Law” is a form of mob violence and putative justice, usually involving, but is by no means restricted to, the illegal hanging of suspected criminals. It was common in the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Before the Civil War, victims of lynchings were usually Blacks and persons suspected of aiding escaped slaves; lynching was mainly a frontier phenomenon. However, during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to curb what they viewed as excesses within the radical Republican Reconstruction government. Federal troops operating under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan, but with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, White southerners regained nearly exclusive control of the region's governments and courts. Lynchings declined, but were by no means brought to an end. In 1892, 161 Blacks were lynched. The largest single lynching incident in America's history was the lynching of 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1892. This incident was popularized in the HBO movie, Vendetta. After the Civil War, it was done as a means of “justice” and carried out by a mob, usually against minorities.
After the 1915 release of the movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and racial supremacy, the Klan re-formed and re-adopted lynching as a means to socially, economically and politically terrorize and paralyze black populations. The victims of such lynchings were usually Black men and they were often accused of assaulting or raping White women, but never given the chance to be proven innocent or guilty. Lynch Law declined sharply after 1935, and there have been no reported incidents of this type since the late 1960s.
The executions of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized. It is likely that many more unrecorded lynchings occurred in this period. Lynching statistics were kept only for the 86 years between 1882 and 1968, and were based primarily on newspaper accounts. Yet the socio-political impact of lynchings could be significant, as illustrated by the restoration in 1901 of capital punishment in the state of Colorado as the result of a lynching outbreak in 1900.
Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism and innuendo. Three thousand, five hundred victims of lynching were Black people. Lynchings took place in every single state except four: Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, but were concentrated in the South, particularly, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texasand Louisiana. Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done and those photographs were distributed on postcards, collected and featured written words to accompany the images.
In 2007, the “Jena Six” incident in Jena, La., demonstrated the ongoing cultural significance of lynching. Nooses were tied to a school tree by a group of racist students and this was done to intimidate minority students from hanging out by that particular tree. This recalled the history and negative memories of lynchings for the Black students and altercations, both verbal and physical, ensued.
Lynching in the United States has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the American frontier, Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. Originally, lynching meant any extra-judicial punishment usually carried out by a group, including tarring and feathering, and the running out-of-townof individuals. But during the 19th century in the United States, it began to be used to refer specifically to execution, usually by hanging in front of a rally of people.
On the American frontier, where the power of the police and the army was tenuous, lynching was seen by some as a positive alternative to lawlessness. In the Reconstruction-Era South, lynching of Blacks was used, especially by the Ku Klux Klan, as a tool for reversing the social effects brought on by Federal changes and amendments. This type of racially-motivated lynching continued in the “Jim Crow” era as a way of enforcing subservience in and preventing economic competition from minorities, it continued into the 20th century as a method of resisting the Civil Rights Movement. More recently, lynching has come to have a contemporary informal use as a label for social vilification, particularly in the media, and particularly of Blacks.
Lynchings Make Their Way West
There is much debate over the violent history of lynchings, which have been obscured by the mythology of theAmerican Old West. Compared to their mythologized version, real lynchings on the Western frontier did not focus as much on "rough and ready" crime prevention, and often shared many of the same racist and partisan political dimensions as lynchings in the South and Midwest. In unorganized territories or sparsely-settled states, security was often provided only by a federal marshal who might, despite the appointment of deputies, be hours or even days away by horse. But many lynchings on the frontier were carried out against accused criminals who were already in custody, and frequently the goal of lynching was not so much to substitute for an absent legal system as it was to provide an alternative system that would favor a particular social class or racial group.
The San Francisco Vigilance Movement, for example, has traditionally been portrayed as a positive response to government corruption and rampant crime, but revisionists have argued that it created more lawlessness than it eliminated. It also had a strongly nativist tinge, initially focusing on the Irish and later evolving into mob violence against Chinese and Mexican immigrants.
During the California Gold Rush, as many as 25,000 Mexicans arrived in California. Many of these Mexicans were experienced miners and had great success mining gold in California. Their success created animosity and many White prospectors intimidated Mexican miners with the threat of violence or lynching. Between 1848 and 1860, at least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California alone. One particularly infamous lynching occurred on July 5, 1851, when a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia was lynched by a mob in Downieville, Calif. She was accused of killing a White man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home.
Another well documented episode in the history of the American West is the Johnson County War, which was a dispute over land use in Wyoming in the 1890s. Large-scale ranchers, with the complicity of local and federalRepublican politicians, hired mercenary soldiers and assassins to lynch the small ranchers, who were mostlyDemocrats and were their economic competitors.
Though not on the frontier, there were several lynchings in July of 1863 as part of the New York Draft Riots. The riots were sparked in part by job competition between Irish-American immigrants and freed Blacks, and during the riots, 11 Blacks were killed, and many more were beaten, and their property was destroyed. The riots led to a brief exodus of Blacks from New York and helped establish Harlem as the center of Black society in that city.
The KKK and Lynching
After the Civil War, lynching became particularly associated with the South and with the first group of Ku Klux Klan, who founded in 1866. The first heavy period of lynching in the South was between 1868 and 1871. It began with a purge of Black and White Republicans by White Democrats. At this time, Republicans were more liberal, progressive-thinking and were mainly from the North. Democrats were typically from the South and believed in state’s rights and slavery. Whites had decided to prevent the ratification of new constitutions by preventing people from voting. Failed attempts at terrorization and disenfranchisement led to a massacre during the 1868 presidential elections, with the systematic murder of about 1,300 Republican voters across various southern states ranging fromSouth Carolina to Arkansas.
After this partisan political violence had ended, lynchings in the South focused more on race than on partisan politics, and can be seen as a latter-day expression of the slave patrols, the bands of poor Whites that policed the slaves and pursued escapees. The lynchers sometimes murdered their victims but sometimes whipped them to remind them of their former status as slaves. White vigilantes often raided Black homes in order to confiscate their firearms. Lynchings aimed at preventing freedmen from voting and from bearing arms can be seen as extralegal ways of enforcing the Black Codes. The codes were invalidated by the 14th and 15th Amendments in 1868 and 1870, and were followed by the Jim Crow laws.
After years of terror, President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871. This permitted authorities to use martial law in some counties, such as ones in South Carolina, where the original Klan was the strongest. At about this time, the Klan dissipated. Vigorous federal action and the disappearance of the Klan had a strong effect in reducing lynching. From 1868 to 1876, most years had 50-100 lynchings, but from 1877 to 1888, the toll ranged from one to 17 victims per year.
While the vast majority of lynchings happened to Blacks, during the 1800s and early 20th century, Italian-Americanswere the second-most common target of lynchings. On March 14, 1891, 11 Italian-Americans were lynched in New Orleans after a jury found them not guilty in the case of the murder of a New Orleans police chief. David Hennessy. The 11 were falsely accused of being associated with the Mafia. This incident was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. Lynchings of Italian-Americans occurred mostly in the South but also occurred in New York, Pennsylvaniaand Colorado. Chinese immigrants, East Indians, Native Americans and Mexicans were also likely lynching victims.
The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest has long been overlooked in American history. This may be due to the fact that most historical records categorized Mexican, Chinese and Native American lynching victims as White. It is estimated that at least 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928. Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic is second only to that of the Black community during that period, who suffered an average of 37.1 per 100,000 of population. But between 1848 and 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population.
Henry Smith was one of the most famous lynched Blacks. He was lynched in Paris, Texas, in 1893 for allegedly killing and raping Myrtle Vance, the 3-year-old daughter of a Texas policeman who had arrested Smith for being drunk and disorderly. Smith was said to have had torn her body to two pieces and had afterwards been, “so indifferent to the crime that lay down and slept by his mutilated little victim all night" according to a New York Heraldarticle. A large crowd followed the lynching. Henry Smith was fastened to a wooden platform, tortured for 50 minutes by red-hot iron brands beginning at his feet and inch by inch up his body until they reached his face, then finally burned alive while over 10,000 spectators cheered.
After 1876, the frequency of lynching decreased, and it became a threat used to terrorize Blacks and maintain the new, racist social order that was being constructed. Congress had housed many Southern Republicans who sought to protect Black voting rights by using federal troops. A congressional deal to electRutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876 included a pledge to end Reconstruction in the South. The Redeemers, White racists who often included White Cappers and Ku Klux Klan members, began to breakdown any political power that Blacks had gained during Reconstruction. Lynchings were seen as supporting the new status quo and were carried out in public.
Another reaction against Reconstruction was the creation of the Jim Crow laws beginning in the 1890s. Terror and lynching were used to enforce both these formal laws and a variety of unwritten rules of conduct meant to assert White domination. From 1889 to 1923, there were about 50-100 lynchings per year.
Often Jim Crow tensions went hand in hand with economic tensions. In 1887, 10,000 workers at sugar plantations in Louisiana, organized by the Knights of Labor, went on strike for an increase in their pay to $1.25 per day. Most of the workers were Black, but some were White. Infuriated, Governor Samuel Douglas declared that "God Almighty has himself drawn the color line." The militia was called in but then withdrawn to give free rein to a lynch mob in Thibodaux, which killed somewhere between 20 and 300 people. A Black-owned newspaper described the scene: "’Six killed and five wounded’ is what the daily papers here say, but from an eye witness to the whole transaction we learn that no less than 35 Negroes were killed outright. Lame men and blind women shot; children and hoary-headed grandsires ruthlessly swept down! The Negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected. Those of them not killed took to the woods, a majority of them finding refuge in this city.”
Labor conflict was also behind the 1917 East St. Louis Riot, where White workers' anger at Black competition for jobs was a primary cause of racial violence. While newspapers estimated the death toll as high as 200 Blacks, the official estimate remains 39 Blacks and nine Whites.
In 1915, three closely related events occurred: the lynching of Leo Frank, the release of the film The Birth of a Nation and the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan with a new emphasis on violence against immigrants, Jews andCatholics.
The 1915 murder of factory manager Leo Frank, a Jewish man, was one of the more notorious lynchings of a non-Black. In sensationalistic newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of fantastic sexual crimes, and of the alleged murder of Mary Phagan, a woman employed by his factory. He was convicted of murder after a questionable trial in Georgia. The judge asked that Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was announced because of the violent mob of people in the court house. His appeals to the Supreme Court over the ruling failed. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented; he condemned the intimidation of the jury as failing to provide due process of law. The governor then commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, but a mob calling itself the “Knights of Mary Phagan” kidnapped Frank from the prison farm and lynched him. Ironically, the evidence in the murder actually pointed to the factory's Black janitor, Jim Conley, who had a criminal record, was seen washing a bloody shirt and repeatedly changed his story. It later came out that Conley had confessed to three different people that he had been Phagan's murderer. Yet, many Black-Americans believed that the extensive national attention focused on Frank as an "American Dreyfus" would never have happened if Frank had been Black.
The Frank trial was used skillfully by Georgia politician and publisher Tom Watson as a strategy to build support for the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan, with a new anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and nativist slant. The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a mountaintop meeting attended by aging members of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan. The recreation of the Klan was also greatly aided by D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation that glorified the Klan. The film resonated with many Southerners who believed Frank was guilty, because they saw an analogy between Mary Phagan and the film's character Flora, a young virgin who throws herself off a cliff to avoid being raped by the Black character Gus.
There were often three motives for lynchings in the United States. The first was the social aspect: righting some social wrong or perceived social wrong, such as a violation of Jim Crow etiquette. This motive frequently overlapped into the second motive, which was frustration with the legal system. Cattle barons normally hanged those who were caught with cattle because to get legal authorities involved was a difficult and lengthy process. Vigilance committees, sickened by the failure to deal with criminal activity by authorities, took matters into their own hands. Another motive was the economic aspect. For example, upon the successful lynching of a Black farmer or immigrant merchant, the property of that person would be available and open for White-Americans. A Black journalist, Ida B. Wells, claimed in the 1890s that Black lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape only about one-third of the time. The most prevalent accusation was murder or attempted murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition and independence of mind. Lynch mobs formed to restore the perceived social order.
Some lynch mobs restored the social order in racist frenzies that included beatings, dismemberment, torture and destruction of property. Murder was a common form of lynch mob "justice," sometimes with the complicity of law-enforcement authorities who participated directly or held victims in jail until a mob formed to carry out the murder. Most lynchings terminated with a hanging, but victims were sometimes tortured prior to being killed by such methods as beating, burning, stabbing, sexual mutilation and eye-gouging. Photographs of these events frequently show the perpetrators laughing and smiling. Aside from hanging, the most common methods of killing were burning, shooting and beating to death.
Often victims were lynched by a small group of White vigilantes late at night. Sometimes, however, lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus atmosphere. Children often attended these public lynchings, which anti-lynching advocates saw as a form of indoctrination and borderline child abuse. A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper, and there were cases in which a lynching was started early so that a newspaper reporter could make his deadline. It was common for postcards to be sold depicting lynchings, typically allowing a newspaper photographer to make some extra money. These postcards became popular enough to be an embarrassment to the government, and the postmaster officially banned them in 1908. However, the lynching postcards continued to exist through the 1930s.
Not surprisingly, less than one percent of lynch-mob participants were ever convicted of this crime. Trial juries in the southeastern United States were typically all-White and wouldn’t vote to convict lynchers. Often juries never let the matter go past the inquest. In a typical example, in 1892, in Port Jervis, N.Y., a police officer tried to stop the lynching of a Black man who had been wrongfully accused of assaulting a White woman, his innocence was discovered post-mortem. The mob responded by putting the noose around the officer's neck as a way of scaring him. At the inquest, the officer identified eight people who had participated in the lynching, including the former chief of police, but the jury decided that the murder had been carried out "by person or persons unknown."
More than 85 percent of the estimated 5,000 lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the Southern states, and the problem peaked in 1892 when 161 Blacks were lynched.
Not all racially motivated lynchings in the United States took place in the South. One such incident occurred inDuluth, Minn., on June 15, 1920, when three young Black travelers were dragged from their jail cells, where they were confined after being accused of raping a White woman, and were lynched by a mob of reportedly more than 1,000 people. Later a book titled The Lynchings in Duluth documented the events.
Since lynchings were often carried out on the pretext of protecting White women from “rape” by Black men, in 1930, White women formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching to repudiate the claim that this was the true purpose of lynching. Further doubt was cast on this claim in 1965, when Viola Liuzzo, a White mother of five who had been raised in the South, was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members after she participated in the Civil Rights March from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala.
America could be seen as having had two legal systems running in parallel, a formal one in the courts and an informal one that operated via lynching, but both were highly racially polarized, and both operated to enforce White social dominance. Terrorism is a more natural explanation of the highly political violence of the 1868 massacres, as well as the bulk of the Ku Klux Klan's actions, and especially examples such as the random lynching of Michael Donald.
By the late 19th century, Black Americans had the political experience and confidence to begin to push back against what was, in effect, a gradual decrease in civil rights. In 1888, the Tuskegee Institute began to assiduously document lynchings, a practice it continued until 1968. Journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was shocked when three of her friends in Memphis, Tenn., were lynched because their grocery store competed successfully with a White-owned store. Outraged and hurt, Wells-Barnett began a global anti-lynching campaign that raised awareness of the social injustice.
Some Blacks fought back believing the government would never protect them against lynching anyway. During a nationwide rash of race riots in 1919, a young Black man from Chicago Eugene Williams, paddled a raft near aLake Michigan beach into "White territory," and drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a young White man. Witnesses pointed out the killer to a police officer. He refused to make an arrest, and an indignant Black mob attacked the officer. Violence broke out across the city, and while the police stood by, White mobs, many of them organized around Irish clubs, began pulling Blacks at random off of trolley cars, attacking Black businesses, and beating victims with baseball bats and iron bars. Blacks began to fight back, and eventually 23 Blacks and 15 Whites were killed.
Black resistance against lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921 in Tulsa, Okla., a group of Black citizens attempted to stop a lynch mob from taking Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black man and assault suspect out of jail. A scuffle ensued between a White man and an armed Black veteran, and the White man was killed. Whites retaliatedby burning 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses in the segregated Black Greenwood district, and leaving 26 Black, 13 White dead. Recent investigations suggest the number of Black deaths may have been much higher. However, Rowland was not lynched and was exonerated.
By the 1930s, their goal was accomplished when the rate of lynchings was reduced about 10 per year in Southern states. With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932, anti-lynching advocates such asMary McLeod Bethune and Walter Francis White, who had campaigned for Roosevelt, hoped he would in turn support their campaign to end lynching. Senators Robert Wagner and Edward P. Costigan drafted the Costigan-Wagner bill that would require local authorities to protect prisoners from lynch mobs. The proposed bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime rather than a state crime, was blocked by virtually all of Southern senators. They used a filibuster to prevent a vote on the bill. A lynching in Miami changed the political climate in Washington, D.C. On July 19, 1935, Rubin Stacy, a homeless Black farmer, had been knocking on doors begging for food. Miami resident Marion Jones complained to the authorities. Six Dade County deputies were taking Stacy to jail when he was killed by a lynch mob. Because Stacy's original actions were so innocuous, lynching opponents considered Stacy's killing an egregious example. Nevertheless, Roosevelt did not support the bill, believing that it might cost him the votes of Southern Whites, and thus the entire 1936 election. In 1939, Roosevelt created the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department, which made efforts to combat lynching but failed to win any convictions until 1946.
In the 1930s, communist organizations, including a legal defense organization called the International Labor Defense, became active in the anti-lynching cause. The ILD defended the Scottsboro Boys, and three Black men accused of rape in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in 1933. In the Tuscaloosa case, two of the defendants were lynched under circumstances that suggested police complicity, and the ILD lawyers themselves narrowly escaped lynching. Black Americans in general remained unreceptive toward communism, however, and the ILD lawyers aroused passionate hatred among many Southerners.
President Theodore Roosevelt made public statements against lynching in his sixth annual State of the Unionaddress on December 4, 1906. This triggered a filibuster in the United States Senate in 1902 during the consideration of his "Philippines Bill" by intimating that lynching was taking place there; and he refrained from commenting on the use of the issue in Southern political campaigns in 1903.
Indiana’s Governor Winfield T. Durbin had successfully used the National Guard to disperse lynchers, and he publicly declared that the accused murderer—a Black man—was entitled to a fair trial. For his efforts, Roosevelt lost a lot of political support among White people—especially in the South—and received threats sufficient that hisSecret Service detail had to be increased.
Post World War II
After World War II, the federal government began to take its first productive actions against lynching. In 1946, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department won the first successful prosecution against a lyncher. Florida constable Tom Crews was sentenced to a $1,000 fine and one year in prison for civil rights violations in the killing of a Black farm worker.
In 1946, a mob of White men shot and killed two young Black men and two young Black women near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Ga. This lynching shocked the nation and was a key factor that led President Harry Truman to make civil rights a priority. In 1947, the Truman Administration published a report titled "To Secure These Rights," which advocated, among other civil rights reforms, making lynching a federal crime. Truman had paid a $10 membership fee to join the Ku Klux Klan in 1924, but at a meeting with a Klan officer arranged by Truman's friend, Klan member Edgar Hinde, the Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics if he was reelected as county judge; Truman refused, because many of the men he had commanded in World War I had been Catholic, and his membership fee was returned as he decided not to join, and he was later reviled by the Klan for his civil rights activities. In April of 2006, the FBI confirmed that it has an investigation in progress relating to the aforementioned Moore's Ford Bridge case.
By the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. A 1955 case that sparked public outrage was that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy who was spending the summer with relatives in the South, and was mutilated and killed for allegedly having whistled at a White woman. Till’s incident may be the most famous episode of mob violence in American history. Two defendants were tried, but acquitted. In 1959 Mack Charles Parkerwas criminally abducted from his jail cell and murdered while awaiting trial for the alleged rape of a White woman inMississippi. His body was found later in the Pearl River, but those guilty of this crime were never prosecuted.
In 1964, three civil rights workers were lynched by White racists in Neshoba County, Miss. Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were members of the Equality and were dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination. They disappeared in June while investigating the arson of a black church. Their bodies were found six weeks later in a partially constructed dam near Philadelphia, Miss. In 2005, 80-year-oldEdgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter for the killings of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, and was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Although lynchings became much rarer in the era following the civil rights movement, they do still occur sometimes. In 1981, KKK members in Alabama randomly picked out a 19-year-old Black boy, Michael Donald, and murdered him in retaliation for a jury's acquittal of a Black man accused of murdering a police officer. The Klansmen were eventually caught, prosecuted and convicted, and a $7 million judgment in a subsequent civil suit bankrupted that chapter of the Klan.
In 1998, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered by Shawn Allen Berry, Lawrence Russel Brewer, and John William King, in Jasper, Texas. Byrd, a 49-year-old father of three, who had accepted an early-morning ride home with Berry, Brewer and King, was instead beaten, stripped, chained to a pickup truck and dragged for almost three miles. An autopsy suggested that Byrd was alive for much of the dragging and died only after his right arm and head were severed. The three men dumped their victim's mutilated remains in the town's segregated Black cemetery and then went to a barbecue. Many of the aspects of this modern lynching echo the social customs surrounding older lynchings documented in Without Sanctuary. King wore a tattoo depicting a Black man hanging from a tree as well as Nazi, Aryan and Confederate Knights of America symbols. Local authorities immediately treated the murder as ahate crime and requested FBI assistance. The murderers were later caught and stood trial. Brewer and King were sentenced to death. Berry received life in prison.
Lynching in the New Millennium
On June 13, 2005, the United States Senate formally apologized for its failure in previous decades to enact a federal anti-lynching law, all of which turned into filibusters and were voted against by powerful Southern senators. Prior to the vote, Senator Mary Landrieu (__-LA) noted, "There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility." The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 senators cosponsoring, causing some to point out that the remaining 20 did not have to take a position on the matter through either co-sponsorship or a recorded vote in favor or against.
Known today as Tuskegee University, the institution that has been recognized as the official expert charged with documenting lynching since 1882. Tuskegee remains the single complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882, and is the source for all other compiled statistics. As of 1959, which was the last time that their annual Lynch Report was published, a total of 4,733 persons had died as a result of lynching since 1882. The same source gives the following statistics for the period from 1882 to 1951. 88 percent of victims were Black and 10 percent were White. Fifty-nine percent of the lynchings occurred in the Southern states of Kentucky, North Carolina,South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Lynching was not uncommon in the West and Midwest but was virtually nonexistent in the northeast, except for Wilmington, Del.; Port Jervis, N.Y. and Coatesville, Penn.
The most common reasons given for the lynchings were murder and rape, but as documented by Wells, such charges were often pretexts for lynching Blacks who violated Jim Crow etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites. Other common reasons given include arson, theft, assault and robbery; sexual transgressions (miscegenation, adultery, cohabitation); "race prejudice," "race hatred," "racial disturbance;" informing on others; "threats against Whites;" and violations of the color lines, such as "attending White girl" or "proposals to White woman." There has been criticism regarding Tuskegee's method of categorizing most lynching victims as either Black or White in publications and data summaries. The list of White victims actually includes many Mexican, Native American, Chinese and Italian victims.
For most of the history of the United States, lynching was rarely prosecuted, and when it was, it was under state murder statutes. In one example from 1907 to 1909, the U.S. Supreme Court tried its only criminal lynching case in history, . Shipp was found guilty of criminal contempt for lynching Ed Johnson inChattanooga, Tenn.
Starting in 1909, over 200 bills were introduced to make lynching a federal crime, but they all failed to pass. During the Roosevelt Administration, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department tried, but failed, to prosecute lynchers under Reconstruction-era civil rights laws. The first successful federal prosecution of a lyncher for a civil rights violation was in 1946, and by that time, the era of lynchings as a common occurrence was over.
Many states now have specific anti-lynching statutes. California, for example, defines lynching, punishable as by a mere two to four years in prison, and "the taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer," with the crime of "riot" defined as two or more people using violence or the threat of violence. A lyncher could thus be prosecuted for several crimes arising from the same action, for example riot, lynching and murder. Although lynching in the historic sense is virtually nonexistent today, the lynching statutes are sometimes used in cases where several people try to wrest a suspect from the hands of police in order to help him escape, as alleged in a July 9, 2005, violent attack on a police officer in San Francisco.
South Carolina law defines second degree lynching as "[a]ny act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person and from which death does not result shall constitute the crime of lynching in the second degree and shall be a felony. Any person found guilty of lynching in the second degree shall be confined at hard labor in the state penitentiary for a term not exceeding 20 years or less than three years, at the discretion of the presiding judge.” In 2006, five White teenagers were given various sentences for the second degree lynching of a young Black man in South Carolina.
Origins Defined
Lynching is the practice of inflicting summary punishment upon an offender, by a self-constituted court armed with no legal authority; it is now limited to the summary execution of one charged with some flagrant offence. In its earliest usage the term implied "the infliction of punishment such as whipping, tarring and feathering, or the like." Today it refers only to the inflicting of sentence of death by lynch law.
Currently it exists as an extrajudicial punishment for persons said to be involved in terrorism and as a method of enforcing social domination. It is characterized by a summary procedure ignoring, bypassing, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably judicial execution. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old; lynching, for example, is believed to have started long before hanging was adopted as a judicial form of execution.
"Lynch law" was prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, or where government is weak and officers of the law are too few and too powerless to preserve order. In the early 20th century, it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe. One suggestion is that it came from Lynch’s Creek, S.C., where mob justice was administered to outlaws as well as marginalized groups like Blacks. Another popular theory around Asia is that the term is derived from the idea of the death penalty, which in Chinese, is pronounced "lingchi" and literally translated, means, “slow slicing” in China and Korea.
Lynching is sometimes justified by its supporters as the administration of justice (in a social-moral sense, not in law) without the delays and inefficiencies inherent to the legal system. The English word, "lynching," since 1835 is a verb derived from the earlier expression Lynch law. This phrase is likely named after the Lynch family. The most likely eponym for the concept of Lynch law is William Lynch, the author of "Lynch's Law." This was an agreement with the Virginia State Legislature on September 22, 1782, which allowed Lynch to pursue and punish criminals inPittsylvania County, Va., without due process of law, because legal proceedings were virtually impossible to get in the area due to the lack of adequate provision of courts.
Extralegal punishments continued to be duplicated in the newly independent U.S.A. and elsewhere at the start of the Revolutionary War. The term "lynch law" came in to general use as a loose description of any efforts taken to maintain the established order, either by the use of actual lynchings (hangings) or even merely threatening to do so. The threat of being lynched often proved sufficient to silence activists and critics. The term “lynch mob,” meant a group of private persons who collectively practice lynching. Since the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War, lynching came to mean, generally, capital punishment by a summary of people (a mob) who are unauthorized to carry out law enforcement. The meaning was narrowed further to extralegal execution specifically by hanging, during the 20th century.
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