The History of Lynching in America

The legal definition of lynching is when three or more persons, which constitute a mob, put someone to death extralegally, without court sanction, without legal sanction, and they do it for the purpose of tradition and/or whatever their version of justice is. And this becomes a legal definition by the 1920s, so the NAACP and their struggle, of course, against lynching and trying to make lynching a federal crime.

Lynching actually begins in the Revolutionary War years, and it's named after the brother of the man who founded Lynchburg, Virginia. And lynching took place—this is "extralegal justice," in quotes, takes place during that period of time, because it's not too many courts. It's, sort of, difficult to get to them. This is a period that the British are also in place in many places in the South, and so it becomes very dangerous to move around. And so this is a form of justice, of local justice, that is not condoned by a formal court.
it first emerged as a form of vigilante retribution used to enforce “popular justice” on the Western frontier. In the Western territories in the early nineteenth century, the individual desire for revenge was high, government was absent or underdeveloped, and public support for lynching was widespread. Notably, lynching did not initially mean killing, and vigilante “regulators” often punished “thieves, highwaymen, swindlers, and card sharks with tarring-and-feathering, beatings, and floggings.
Beginning in the 1830s and continuing in the decades following the Civil War, lynching became more synonymous with hanging. The first broadly publicized incident of lethal lynching occurred in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835, after a fabricated story of a planned slave uprising sparked local panic and resulted in the hangings of two white men and several enslaved Black people.

It's interesting—it's not until 1886 that the number of black lynch victims actually exceed the number of white lynch victims. So this is an American tradition that becomes racialized later for a number of reasons. There's a constant struggle over the meaning of who deserves the protection and rights that are talked about in the US Constitution. And what happens, of course, is that one of the function of a stereotype, of a racial stereotype, is to show that someone is undeserving of first-class citizenship. And until rather recently, first-class citizenship was seen not as a right but as a privilege.

it first emerged as a form of vigilante retribution used to enforce “popular justice” on the Western frontier. In the Western territories in the early nineteenth century, the individual desire
for revenge was high, government was absent or underdeveloped, and public support for lynching was widespread. Notably, lynching did not initially mean killing, and vigilante “regulators” often punished “thieves, highwaymen, swindlers, and card sharks with tarring-and-feathering, beatings, and floggings.
Beginning in the 1830s and continuing in the decades following the Civil War, lynching became more synonymous with hanging. The first broadly publicized incident of lethal lynching occurred in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835, after a fabricated story of a planned slave uprising sparked local panic and resulted in the hangings of two white men and several enslaved Black people.

these killings marked a change in American mob violence, Mobs during the American Revolution rarely killed their victims, but the 1835 riots claimed at least seventy-one lives.” As a result lynchings became more frequently deadly, this was region specific, An individual subject to a frontier lynching typically was accused of a crime such as murder or robbery, given some form of process and trial, and hanged without any additional torture.

Southern lynchings, on the other hand, were commonly extrajudicial and employed to defend slavery. Between 1830 and 1860, Southern mobs killed an estimated 130 white individuals and at least 400 enslaved Black people. Most were lynched under suspicion of conspiring to mount a slave uprising. A growing but largely unsubstantiated fear among whites in slaveholding states. In addition, Southern lynchings of African Americans were distinct from lynchings of whites, and often featured extreme brutality such as burning, torture, mutilation, and decapitation of the victim.

Southern lynching took on an even more racialized character after the Civil War. The act and threat of lynching became the primarily a technique of enforcing racial subjugation. Southern mob violence intended to reestablish white supremacy and suppress Black civil rights through social terror, the Reconstruction era was a violent period in which tens of thousands of people were killed in racially- and politically motivated massacres, murders, and lynchings. White mobs regularly targeted African Americans with deadly violence but rarely aimed their lethal attacks at white individuals accused of same violations. By the end of the nineteenth century, Southern lynching had become a tool of racial control that terrorized and targeted African Americans. The ratio of Black lynching victims to white lynching victims was 4 to 1 from 1882 to 1889; increased to more than 6 to 1 between 1890 and 1900; and soared to more than 17 to 1 after 1900. 

These Lynchings commonly became gruesome public spectacles. At these often festive community gatherings, large crowds of whites watched and participated in the Black victims’ prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and burning at the stake. 

Public spectacle lynchings were those in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim.
Many of these spectacles were carnival-like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs, public spectacle lynchings drew from and perpetuated the belief that Africans were subhuman—a myth that had been used to justify centuries of enslavement, and now fueled and purportedly justified terrorism aimed at newly emancipated African American communities.
Lynching was not a means of crime control, Southern states were already equipped with a criminal justice system eager to punish African American defendants with imprisonment and forced labor for state profit, and legal execution. Lynching in the south in the 20th century as a tool of control wielded by white mobs against African American victims. These mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system and many lynching victims were not accused of any criminal act at all.

African Americans were lynched under varied pretenses. One of the most commonly remembered was Black men being accused of sexually assaulting white women. During the lynching era, The hypervigilant enforcement of racial hierarchy and separation of the races, together with widespread stereotypes of Black men as dangerous, violent, and uncontrollable hypersexual aggressors, fueled this fear of Black men raping white women.
Of the over 4084 African American lynching that have been documented, nearly 25 percent were accused of sexual assault and nearly 30 percent were accused of murder.
Hundreds more African Americans were lynched based on accusations of far less serious crimes like assault, and vagrancy, crimes that were not punishable by death had they been convicted in a court of law. additionally, African Americans frequently were lynched for violation of social customs or racial expectations, including speaking disrespectfully, refusing to step off the sidewalk, using profane language, using an improper title for a white person, suing a white man, arguing with a white man, bumping into a white woman, insulting a white person, and other social grievances

Finally, many African Americans were lynched not because they committed a crime or social infraction, and not even because they were accused of doing so, but simply because they were Black and present when the preferred party could not be located. African Americans living in the South during this era were terrorized by the knowledge that they could be lynched if they intentionally or accidentally violated any social more defined by any white person. 

In a strictly maintained racial caste system, the mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could spark outrage, mob violence, and murder before the judicial system could act. In this society, white lives held heightened value, while the lives of Black people held little or none. Law-abiding African Americans lived at risk of arbitrary and deadly mob violence. These lynchings and the threat of falling victim to the mobs who committed them sought to keep the African American community terrorized and in a constant state of fear

Most lynchings involved the killing of one or more specific individuals, but some lynch mobs targeted entire Black communities by forcing Black people to witness lynchings and demanding that they leave the area or face a similar fate. After a lynching in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912, white vigilantes distributed leaflets demanding that all Black people leave the county or suffer deadly consequences; so many Black families fled that, by 1920, the county’s Black population had plunged from 1100 to just thirty.
To maximize lynching as a terrorizing symbol of power and control over the Black community, white mobs frequently chose to lynch victims in a prominent place inside the town’s African American district. The practice of terrorizing an entire African American community after lynching one alleged “wrongdoer” demonstrates that Southern lynching during this era was not to attain “popular justice” or retaliation for crime. Rather, these lynchings were designed for broad impact—to send a message of domination, to instill fear, and sometimes to drive African Americans from the community altogether.

African Americans’ efforts to fight for economic power and equal rights in the early twentieth century—a prelude to the civil rights movement—were violently repressed by whites who acted with impunity. Whites used terrorism to relegate African Americans to a state of second-class citizenship and economic disadvantage that would last for generations after emancipation and create far-reaching consequences.
From 1915 to 1940, lynch mobs targeted African Americans who protested being treated as second class citizens. African Americans throughout the South, individually and in organized groups, were demanding the economic and civil rights to which they were entitled. In response, whites turned to
lynching.