lynching

lynching,

unlawfully hanging or otherwise killing a person by mob action. The term is derived from the older term lynch law, which is most likely named after either Capt. William Lynch (1742–1820), of Pittsylvania co., Va., or Col. Charles LynchLynch, Charles,
1736–96, American Revolutionary soldier, b. near the site of Lynchburg, Va. A member (1767–76) of the Virginia house of burgesses, he took a prominent part in the preparations for war. When a Tory conspiracy was discovered (1780) in Bedford co.
..... Click the link for more information. (1736–96), of neighboring Bedford (later Campbell) co., both of whom used extralegal proceedings to punish Loyalists during the American Revolution. Historically, the term lynching is most commonly applied to racist violence in the post–Civil War American South.

Lynching was common among North American pioneers on the frontier, where legal institutions were not yet established. Lesser crimes might be punished by exile, while crimes that seemed to them capital, such as rape, horse stealing, and cattle rustling, were punished by lynching. Pioneers formed vigilance committees to repress crime (see vigilantesvigilantes
, members of a vigilance committee. Such committees were formed in U.S. frontier communities to enforce law and order before a regularly constituted government could be established or have real authority.
..... Click the link for more information. ). When legal institutions had been duly established, such vigilance committees normally tended to disappear. Measures by such committees had the intrinsic danger of resorting to violence and hasty injustice, and posed a tangible threat to the basis of the law.

Between 1882, when reliable data was first collected, and 1968, when the crime had largely disappeared, there were at least 4,730 lynchings in the United States, including some 3,440 black men and women. Most of these were in the post-Reconstruction South between 1882 and 1944, where southern whites used lynching and other terror tactics to intimidate blacks into political, social, and economic submission. Contrary to a widespread misconception, only about a quarter of lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape. Most blacks were lynched for outspokenness or other presumed offenses against whites, or in the aftermath of race riots. In many cases lynchings were not spontaneous mob violence but involved a degree of planning and law-enforcement cooperation. Racially motivated lynchings, which often involved the mutilation and immolation of the victim, might be witnessed by an entire local community as a diverting spectacle.

State and local governments in the South did little to curtail lynchings; various laws against mob violence were seldom enforced. Three times (1922, 1937, 1940) antilynching legislation passed the House of Representatives, only to be defeated in the Senate. Although the term has fallen into disuse since the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, similar practices still occur, often classified today as "bias crimes."

Bibliography

See R. L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (1980); P. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown (2002).

Lynching

summary reprisal against Negroes and progressive whites in the USA, imposed without trial or investigation.

As a rule, lynching is accompanied by torture, humiliation, and mockery of the victim; it usually leads to death. According to most accounts, the term came into use in the 18th century and derives from a racist American colonel named Lynch. During the War of Independence, Lynch commanded a battalion of riflemen in Virginia, where the existing courts of law virtually did not function. On his own authority, he set up a court where cruel methods were used against criminals, and especially against political opponents. A special law declaring Lynch’s actions illegal was passed in October 1782, but the procedure itself was not condemned.

In time the very practice of summary reprisals came to be called lynching. The unwritten code of lynching, called lynch law, became a tool for class reprisals by reactionaries against the most active figures in the trade-union, Negro, anti-imperialist, and Communist movements in the USA.

Lynching was most widespread from the end of the 19th century until the 1930’s. According to the data of one American author, Frank Shay (Judge Lynch, New York, 1969), 4,730 cases of lynching were officially recorded in the USA between 1882 and 1951. Of these, 3,657 involved Negroes. Moreover, the authorities were indifferent to lynching in practice. Federal law and the law of a number of states provide no criminal penalties for lynching.

Since the middle of the 20th century, lynching has acquired an openly class character and more frequently takes the form of direct murder of Negroes and progressive figures. Lynching is particularly provoked by such extreme rightist, profascist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society.

Lynching

An African American victim of a 1928 lynching. Between 1880 and 1930, an estimated 2,400 black men, women, and children were killed by lynch mobs.
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Violent punishment or execution, without due process, for real or alleged crimes.

The concept of taking the law into one's own hands to punish a criminal almost certainly predates recorded history. Lynching (or "lynch law") is usually associated in the United States with punishment directed toward blacks, who made up a highly disproportionate number of its victims. (While the origins of the term "lynch" are somewhat unclear, many sources cite William Lynch, an eighteenth-century plantation owner in Virginia who helped to mete out vigilante justice.)

Lynching acquired its association with violence against blacks early in the nineteenth century. It was used as a punishment against slaves who tried to escape from their owners. Sometimes, whites who openly opposed Slavery were the victims of lynch mobs as well. Perhaps not surprisingly, lynching did not become a pervasive practice in the South until after the Civil War. The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted blacks full rights of citizenship, including the right to Due Process of Law. Southern whites had been humiliated by their loss to the North, and many resented the thought that their former slaves were now on an equal footing with them (relatively speaking). Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia attracted white Southerners who had been left destitute by the war. These groups promoted violence (sometimes indirectly) as a means of regaining white supremacy.

Part of the appeal of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan was their white supremacy focus. But these groups also played on the fears of Southern whites—that blacks would be able to compete with them for jobs, that blacks could run for political office, and even that blacks could rebel against whites. Lynchings were carried out because of these fears. Whites believed that lynchings would terrorize blacks into remaining subservient while allowing whites to regain their sense of status.

Lynchings became even more widespread beginning in the 1880s and would remain common in the South until the 1930s. Between 1880 and 1930, an estimated 2,400 black men, women, and children were killed by lynch mobs. (During the same time period, roughly 300 whites were lynched.) Most lynchings occurred in the Deep South (i.e., Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina). Border Southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina also had a noteworthy number of lynchings.

A partial list of "crimes" that prompted lynch mobs during these years underscores a chilling disregard for life: gambling, quarreling, arguing with a white man, attempting to vote, unruly remarks, demanding respect, and "acting suspiciously." Lynchings were often carried out against those suspected of more serious crimes, but they were carried out without allowing a fair trial. It is no exaggeration to state that any black man, woman, or child in the South during these years was in danger of being lynched for any real or imagined improper behavior.

Often, the victim of a lynching would be dragged from his or her home; not infrequently, a lynch mob would drag a victim from a jail cell where supposedly he or she was to be awaiting a fair trial. The typical lynch mob would be made up of local citizens; a core group would actually carry out the crime, while many of the town's residents would look on. The spectators often included "respectable" men and women, and children were often brought to lynchings. A lynching victim might be shot, stabbed, beaten, or hanged; if he was not hanged to death, his body would often be hung up for display. Local police, and even members of the armed forces, either could not or would not intervene to stop a lynch mob from taking the law into its own hands. Not infrequently, a lynching would conclude with a loud, rowdy demonstration among the assembled crowd. The clear message in each lynching was that the mob was in control.

One of the most common crimes answered by lynch mobs was rape—particularly the rape of a white woman by a black man. Often, all that a black man had to do to be accused of rape was to speak to a white woman or ask her out. Lynchers justified their actions by saying that they needed to protect women from dangerous men. In response, a group of prominent women from seven Southern states met in 1930 to form the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. This group deplored not only the act of lynching itself, but also the fact that lynchings were frequently witnessed by women and children. They were angered by claims that lynching was a means of protecting white women. During the 1930s, they worked to eliminate lynchings throughout the South.

Efforts by politicians to end lynchings were weak at best. Efforts to move anti-lynching legislation through Congress in the early 1900s and again in the 1930s proved futile, in part because Southern representatives and senators carried significant political weight. The first politician to take a visible stand against lynching was President Harry S. Truman, in 1946. Shocked by a lynching in Monroe, Georgia, in which four people—one a World War II veteran—were pulled off of a bus and shot dozens of times by a mob, Truman launched a campaign to guarantee Civil Rights for blacks, including a push for federal anti-lynching laws.

Truman was able to realize part of what he wanted, but the powerful Southern lobby managed to maintain much of the status quo. Although large-scale lynchings were no longer staged, blacks in the South still faced vigilante retribution. The murder of Emmett Till, in 1955, put enormous pressure on the South to condemn such barbarism. Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi, where he made suggestive remarks to a white woman. The woman's husband and brother-in-law tracked Till down, shot him, and threw his body in a river. Although (perhaps because) they were acquitted of the murder, the case added momentum to the growing Civil Rights Movement. People across the nation were genuinely shocked at the trial's outcome, and new civil rights legislation was introduced in Congress. By the time the civil rights act of 1965 was signed into law, there were still racial tensions—and elements of racial discord continue into the twenty-first century—but the era of the free-for-all lynch party in which entire communities participated had effectively come to a close.

Cross-references

Civil Rights Movement; Slavery; Vigilantism.

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lynching

lynching,

Bibliography

Lynching

lynching

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noun putting a person to death by mob action without due process of law

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