Lynching is the occurrence of extrajudicial killings that began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and had mostly ended by time of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, although instances occurred as late as 1981 or 1998, depending on categorization. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary victims of lynchings by white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, where the majority of African Americans lived, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and the border states of the Southwest, where Mexicans were often the victims of lynchings.Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration () out of the American South, and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism. A significant number of lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder. Rape, attempted rape, or other forms of sexual assault were the second most common accusation; these accusations were often used as a pretext for lynching African Americans who were accused of violating Jim Crow era etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites. One study found that there were "4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unidentified gender (although likely male); 3,265 were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1 was Japanese." Several incidents have been cited as the largest mass lynching in history including the 1919 Elaine massacre of African-Americans in Arkansas (100–237), the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871 (19), and the 1891 New Orleans lynchings (11) perpetrated against Italian immigrants.
A common perception of lynchings in the U.S. is that they were only hangings, due to the public visibility of the location, which made it easier for photographers to photograph the victims. Some lynchings were professionally photographed and then the photos were sold as postcards, which became popular souvenirs in parts of the United States. Lynching victims were also killed in a variety of other ways: being shot, burned alive, thrown off a bridge, dragged behind a car, etc. Occasionally, the body parts of the victims were removed and sold as souvenirs. Lynchings were not always fatal; "mock" lynchings, which involved putting a rope around the neck of someone who was suspected of concealing information, was sometimes used to compel people to make "confessions". Lynch mobs varied in size from just a few to thousands.
Lynching steadily increased after the Civil War, peaking in 1892. Lynchings remained common into the early 1900s, accelerating with the emergence of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Lynchings declined considerably by the time of the Great Depression. The 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy, galvanized the civil rights movement and marked the last classical lynching (as recorded by the Tuskegee Institute). The overwhelming majority of lynching perpetrators never faced justice. White supremacy and all-white juries ensured that perpetrators, even if tried, would not be convicted. Campaigns against lynching gained momentum in the early 20th century, championed by groups such as the NAACP. Some 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, but none passed. In 2022, 67 years after Emmett Till's killing and the end of the lynching era, the United States Congress passed anti-lynching legislation in the form of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Civil rights groups, such as JULIAN, argue that lynchings are still occurring in the 21st century.
Background
Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early American legal landscape, with group violence in colonial America being usually nonlethal in intention and result. In the 17th century, in the context of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, lynchings became a frequent form of "mob justice" when authorities were perceived as untrustworthy. In the United States, during the decades after the Civil War, African Americans were the main victims of racial lynching, but in the American Southwest, Mexican Americans were also the targets of lynching as well.
At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, a Black man named McIntosh (who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail) was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people.William Hyde and Howard L. Conrad (eds.), Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis: A Compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference: Volume 4. New York: Southern History Company, 1899; pg. 1913.
According to historian Michael J. Pfeifer, the prevalence of lynchings in post–Civil War America reflected people's lack of confidence in the "due process" of the U.S. judicial system. He links the decline in lynchings in the early 20th century to "the advent of the modern death penalty", and argues that "legislators renovated the death penalty...out of direct concern for the alternative of mob violence". Between 1901 and 1964, Georgia hanged and electrocuted 609 people. Eighty-two percent of those executed were Black men, even though Georgia was majority white. Pfeifer also cited "the modern, racialized excesses of urban police forces in the twentieth century and after" as bearing characteristics of lynchings.
Lynching as a means to maintain white supremacy
Lines of continuity from slavery to present
A major motive for lynchings, particularly in the South, was white society's efforts to maintain white supremacy after the emancipation of enslaved people following the American Civil War. Lynchings punished perceived violations of customs, later institutionalized as Jim Crow laws, which mandated racial segregation of Whites and Blacks, and second-class status for Blacks. A 2017 paper found that more racially segregated counties were more likely to be places where Whites conducted lynchings.
Lynchings emphasized the new social order which was constructed under Jim Crow; Whites acted together, reinforcing their collective identity along with the unequal status of Blacks through these group acts of violence.
Lynchings were also (in part) intended as a voter suppression tool. Lynchings occurred more frequently in proximity to elections, in particular in areas where the Democratic Party faced challenges. Lynchings were also more likely in the aftermath of elections where the Democratic Party performed poorly.
Tuskegee definition Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, defined conditions that constituted a recognized lynching, a definition which became generally accepted by other compilers of the era: 1. There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. 2. That person must have met death illegally. 3. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. 4. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.
Statistics Statistics for lynchings have traditionally come from three sources primarily, none of which covered the entire historical time period of lynching in the United States. Before 1882, no contemporaneous statistics were assembled on a national level. In 1882, the Chicago Tribune began to systematically tabulate lynchings nationally. In 1908, the Tuskegee Institute began a systematic collection of lynching reports under the direction of Monroe Work at its Department of Records, drawn primarily from newspaper reports. Monroe Work published his first independent tabulations in 1910, although his report also went back to the starting year 1882. Finally, in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People started an independent record of lynchings. The numbers of lynchings from each source vary slightly, with the Tuskegee Institute's figures being considered "conservative" by some historians.
Based on the source, the numbers vary depending on which sources are cited, the years that are considered by those sources, and the definitions that are given to specific incidents by those sources. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded the lynchings of 3,446 Blacks and the lynchings of 1,297 Whites, all of which occurred between 1882 and 1968, with the peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and increasing political suppression of Blacks. A six-year study published in 2017 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that 4,084 Black men, women, and children fell victim to "racial terror lynchings" in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950, besides 300 that took place in other states. During this period, Mississippi's 654 lynchings led the lynchings which occurred in all of the Southern states.Beyond the immediate victims, recent research suggests that lynching may have generated long-lasting health consequences for Black communities.
The records of Tuskegee Institute remain the single most complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882 for all states, although modern research has illuminated new incidents in studies focused on specific states in isolation. As of 1959, which was the last time that Tuskegee Institute's annual report was published, a total of 4,733 persons had died by lynching since 1882. The last lynching recorded by the Tuskegee Institute was that of Emmett Till in 1955. In the 65 years leading up to 1947, at least one lynching was reported every year. The period from 1882 to 1901 saw the height of lynchings, with an average of more than 150 each year. 1892 saw the most number of lynchings in a year: 231 or 3.25 per one million people. After 1924 cases steadily declined, with less than 30 a year."1959 Tuskegee Institute Lynch Report", Montgomery Advertiser; April 26, 1959, re-printed in The decreasing rate of yearly lynchings was faster outside the South and for white victims of lynching. Lynching became more of a Southern phenomenon and a racial one that overwhelmingly affected Black victims. There were measurable variations in lynching rates between and within states.
+ Table 3.8: Black victims of lynchings per 100,000 blacks, by state, 1882-1930 (from A festival of violence : an analysis of Southern lynchings, 1882-1930 by Tolnay & Beck, 1995, pg. 38) State No. of victims per 100,000 Mississippi 52.8 Georgia 41.8 Louisiana 43.7 Alabama 32.4 South Carolina 18.8 Florida 79.8 Tennessee 38.4 Arkansas 42.6 Kentucky 45.7 North Carolina 11.0
+ Cause of Lynchings per Tuskegee Institute Cause of Lynching Percentage of victims Murder 38% Rape 16% Attempted rape 7% Felonious assault 6% Theft 7% Insult to white person 2% Miscellaneous/no offence 24%
Being lynched for an offence did not mean the victim was guilty of the alleged offence.Grimshaw, A. (Ed.). (2017). A Social History of Radical Violence. Routledge, pg 56 In 1940, sociologist Arthur F. Raper investigated one hundred lynchings after 1929 and estimated that approximately one-third of the victims were falsely accused.