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Lynching as unlawful communal punishment is historically associated in the United States with racial discrimination or prejudice, but lynching is also associated with communal or collective violence targeting individuals because of ethnicity, age, religion, or gender and the summary execution of a targeted victim, usually by hanging.

In 1912, Paul Walton Black published an extensive analysis of lynching, defining lynching as Ohio legislators did similarly in 1896 in an anti-lynching law: "Any collection of individuals assembled for any unlawful purpose intending to do damage or injury to anyone, or pretending to exercise correctional power over persons by violence, and without authority of law, shall for the purpose of this act be regarded as a ‘mob,' and any act of violence exercised by them upon the body of any person, shall constitute a ‘lynching'." When referring to lynching, the definition employed by recent southern historians in the USA is that of 'collective violence' which has consistency across regions.^[1]

In the United States, lynching is a hate crime^[2] associated with groups whose politically motivated behavior evolves and escalates to extrajudicial or unlawful executions. Groups follow a pattern of behavior in which the members gather and define their ideology and targets, disparage targets through discrediting tactics and smear campaigns, harass or terrorize targets using verbal or physical cues or signs such as the noose^[3], physically attack with and without weapons through violent acts ranging from nuisance to assault, then ultimately attempt to destroy the object of their hate.^[4]

Lynching can culminate in murder by a mob, usually by hanging and sometimes by burning. Lynch mobs, which typically require a large number of participants, can be considered vigilante terrorists.^[5]

An accusation, not guilt, is all that was necessary for mobs in United States history to carry out murder. Some historians view lynching as a form of ethnic cleansing because the majority of those who were murdered by mobs in the United States were blacks and the mob of murderers were white, and lynching was carried out for nearly a century with the intent to control and humiliate a population.^[6] The mob often fancies itself a self-appointed police force with the power to illegally carry out whatever threats they care to, against any individual for any reason. Victims of lynching were often not even accused of crimes:

In the South, lynching was one of the terrorist tactics used to control and threaten the African-American. Between 1889 and 1918, a total of 2,522 black Americans were lynched, 50 of them women. These people were hanged, burned alive, or hacked to death. According to the mythology popular at the time, black men were lynched because they had allegedly raped white women, yet historians found that in eighty percent of the cases there were no sexual charges alleged, let alone proved. People were lynched for petty offenses such as stealing a cow, arguing with a white man, or attempting to register to vote. Social critic H.L. Mencken described the practice as one which "in sheer high spirits, some convenient African is taken at random and lynched, as the newspapers say, 'on general principles.'" No one was punished in the South for taking part in a lynching until 1918, according to a web site maintained by the United States Library of Congress.[6]

Immediately after the Civil War lynching became a preferred way for white planter to terrorize their former slaves who they no longer legally owned and therefore did not value as they had previously.

"Mob violence, to a much greater degree than ever before, became a tool for enforcing conformity to prevailing racial roles. The dismantling of slavery left a void in the enforcement of white supremacy, threatening to deprive planters of their traditional prerogative of disciplining blacks as they chose. Planters, unable or unwilling to renounce the free-handed discipline of the antebellum plantation, whipped, shot, and killed thousands of blacks for arguing over crop settlements, wages, labor contracts, or simply for failing to display sufficient deference. White violence also verged on systematic political terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan, paramilitary groups, and other whites united by frustration and anger ruthlessly defended the interests of the Democratic party, the avowed party of white supremacy. The magnitude of extralegal violence during election campaigns reahced epidemic proportions, leading the historian William Gillette to label it guerilla warfare."^{[7][8][9][10][11]}

In U.S. history, lynch mobs had no legal authority. In its earliest usage the term lynching implied "the infliction of punishment such as whipping or tarring and feathering." Later, it generally refers only to mob murder though it is still used occasionally in its broader meaning in some jurisdictions.^[12]

In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote of the post- World War I period:

"The war-bred hopes of the Negro for first-class citizenship were quickly smashed in a reaction of violence that was probably unprecedented. Some twenty-five race riots were touched off in American cities during the lst six months of 1919, months that John Hope Franklin called 'the greatest period of interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed.' Mobs took over cities for days at a time, flogging, burning, shooting, and torturing at will. When the Negroes showed a new disposition to fight and defend themselves, violence increased. Some of these atrocities occurred in the South—at Longview, Texas, for example, or at Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Elaine, Arkansas or Knoxville, Tennessee. But they were limited to no one section of the country. Many of them occurred in the North and the worst of all was in Chicago. During the first year following the war more than seventy Negroes were lynched, several of them veterans still in uniform." ^[13]

Lynching is a form of extrajudicial punishment, usually culminating in murder, 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 lynchings have often been members of groups marginalized or vilified by the larger community in which they lived.

Pogroms against Jews in the early twentieth century in Russia and south-eastern Europe were another form of community policing, similar to the ethnic cleansing that characterized lynchings in the United States. (See Pogrom and [7].)

Main article: Lynching in the United States

Lynching is mob violence usually resulting in the murder by hanging of victims who usually were not brought before a judge or court. The practice was frequent in the South after the end of the American Civil War in the turmoil of conflict between different social groups, as whites tried to assert dominance over freedpeople. The number of lynchings peaked at the end of the 19th century, but these kinds of murders continued into the twentieth century. The civil rights movement won a slowing of the practice in the 1950s and a halt to most but not all lynchings during the 1960s.

Before the Civil War, whites usually attacked black slaves and persons suspected of aiding escaped slaves; lynching was mainly a frontier phenomenon.

During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to control African Americans, force them to work for planters, and prevent them from voting.^{[14][15] [16][17] [18]} White Republicans were often victims of lynching as well in the post-war period. Federal troops operating under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white southerners regained nearly exclusive control of the region's governments and courts. Lynchings declined briefly, but the practice took hold again with a vengeance by the end of the 19th century. In 1892, 161 African-Americans were lynched. The largest single lynching incident in America's history was the lynching of 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1892. This incident was popularized in the HBO movie "Vendetta".

After the 1915 release of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which glorified lynching and the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed and re-adopted lynching as a means to socially, economically, and politically terrorize and paralyze black populations. Victims were usually black men, and sometimes black women, often accused of assaulting or raping whites. Lynch Law declined sharply by the 1950s.

This memorial to the 1920 Duluth lynchings was described by its artist as attempting to "reinvest [the victims] with their unique personalities", to counteract the way the lynchings "depersonalized" them.

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. In 1901 the state of Colorado restored capital punishment, in response to an outbreak of lynchings in 1900. The state had abolished capital punishment only in 1897.

Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism, and innuendo. 3,500 of its victims were African Americans. Lynchings took place in every state except four, but were concentrated in the Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana). ^[19]

Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done. Those photographs, distributed on postcards, were collected by James Allen, who has published them in book form and online ^[20], with written words and video to accompany the images.

Retaining incriminating evidence is not uncommon for sadistic criminals and in a study conducted by Robert R. Hazelwood, M.S. it was reported that of the sadistic criminals studied: "Forty percent of the men took and kept personal items belonging to their victims...which included...photographs...and some of the offenders referred to them as "trophies"."^[21]

In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the Vehmgerichte in medieval Germany, and of Lydford law, gibbet law or Halifax law, Cowper justice and Jeddart justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain.

In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg, a German prisoner of war known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime in Germany, was lynched by Nazi fanatics in POW Camp 21 in Comrie, Scotland. After the end of the war, five of the perpetrators were hanged at Pentonville Prison - the largest multiple execution in 20th century Britain. [8]

There are also some personal accounts of lynching in Budapest, Hungary, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the occupying Soviets.

On November 23, 2004, in the Tlahuac lynching, three Mexican undercover federal agents doing a narcotics investigation were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan (Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and mistakenly suspected they were trying to abduct children from a primary school. The policemen identified themselves immediately but were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The whole incident was covered by the media almost from the beginning, including their pleas for help and their murder.

By the time police rescue units arrived, two of the policemen were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect the lynching was provoked by the persons being investigated.

Both local and federal authorities abandoned them to their fate, saying the town was too far away to even try to arrive in time and some officials stating they would provoke a massacre if they tried to rescue them from the mob.

Anti-black and anti-Haitian bias has long been a part of Dominican identity and culture. ^[22] According to an Amnesty International report, lynchings of Haitians and black Dominicans have continued to occur as late as 2006.^[23]

The practice of whipping and necklacing offenders and political opponents evolved in the 1980s during the apartheid era in South Africa. Residents of black townships lost confidence in the apartheid judicial system and formed "people's courts" that authorized whip lashings and deaths by necklacing. Necklacing is a term used to describe the torture and execution of victims by igniting a rubber, kerosene-filled, tire that has been forced around the victim's chest and arms. Necklacing was used to punish numerous victims, including children, who were alleged to be traitors to the black liberation movement as well as relatives and associates of the offenders. Of course sometimes the "people's courts" made mistakes, or used the system to punish those to whom leaders were opposed. ^[24] There was tremendous controversy when the practice was endorsed by Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress.^[25]

Untold thousands of low-caste villagers have been lynched by upper-caste villagers throughout rural India. In November 2007, Kailash Bagri was lynched and burnt alive by upper-caste villagers in his village in Madhya Pradesh. ^[26]. He was reportedly lynched by an upper-caste mob for shooing away cattle that belonged to an upper-caste villager with a stick^[27] His body had been burnt so badly that his bones could not be recovered. Villagers were threatened not to tell anyone about the incident, but Mr. Bagri's song leaked the story to news sources.

In September 2007, a low-caste woman was burnt alive by upper-caste villagers in Uttar Pradesh because her son had eloped with a girl from a higher-caste.^[28] In August 2007, a policeman in Bihar beat and drowned two young low-caste girls in a river for stealing firewood from his orchard.^[29] A United Nations committee, equated violence against low-caste Hindus with racial discrimination and has questioned India’s record on treatment of the socially marginalized.^[30]

• Posse
• Summary justice
• High-tech lynching
• KKK
• Terrorism
• Noose

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Lynchings

Look up Lynching in
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• Quinones, Sam; True Tales From Another Mexico: the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Univ. of New Mexico Press) -- Recounts a lynching in a small Mexican town in 1998.
• Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by James Allen, Hilton Als, United States Rep. John Lewis and historian Leon F. Litwack.(Twin Palm Publishers: 2000) ISBN 9780944092699. Republication of many of the photographs on this Wikipedia page directly violates the copyright of these authors and of their web site.
• Etymology OnLine
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. passim
• Gonzales-Day, Ken, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935. Duke University Press, 2006.
• Markovitz, Jonathan, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
• Before the Needles, Executions (and Lynchings) in America Before Lethal Injection, Details of thousands of lynchings
• Houghton Mifflin: The Reader's Companion to American History - Lynching
• Origin of the word Lynch
• Lynchings in the State of Iowa
• Lynchings in America
• Lyrics to "Strange Fruit" a protest song about lynching, written by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday
• The Lynching of Big Steve Long
• Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law, 1893
• NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. New York City: Arno Press, 1919
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture entry: Lynching in Arkansas
• Smith, Tom. The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans "Mafia" Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob [9]

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ FBI hate crime page
3. ^ "Noose: ‘Shameful' sign makes ominous return", by Darryl Fears, Washington Post, Published: October 21, 2007 6:00 a.m.[2]
4. ^ Seven Stage Hate Model [3]
5. ^ "Exploring Roots of Terrorism" Dipak K. Gupta, Department of Political Science & Fed J. Hansen, Institute for World Peace San Diego State University[4]
6. ^ Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by James Allen, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, Hilton Als. (Twin Palms Publishers: 2000) ISBN-13: 978-0944092699
7. ^ Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of Illinois Press: 1993) ISBN-13: 978-0252063459
8. ^ Barry A. Crouch, "A Spirit of Lawlessness: White violence, Texas Blacks, 1865-1868," Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 217–26
9. ^ Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. 119–23;
10. ^ J.C.A. Stagg, "The Problem of Klan Violence: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1868-1871," Journal of American Studies 8 (Dec. 1974): 303–18
11. ^ Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction Harper & Row, 1979
12. ^ http://www.scstatehouse.net/code/t16c003.htm#16-3-220 South Carolina Code of Laws section 16-3-220 Lynching in the second degree
13. ^ C. Vann WoodwardThe Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd edition, p. 114–15
14. ^ Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of Illinois Press: 1993) ISBN-13: 978-0252063459
15. ^ Barry A. Crouch, "A Spirit of Lawlessness: White violence, Texas Blacks, 1865-1868," Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 217–26
16. ^ Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. 119–23
17. ^ J.C.A. Stagg, "The Problem of Klan Violence: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1868-1871," Journal of American Studies 8 (Dec. 1974): 303–18
18. ^ Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction Harper & Row, 1979
19. ^ Dahleen Glanton, "Controversial exhibit on lynching opens in Atlanta" May 5, 2002, Chicago Tribune. Reproduced online
20. ^ Musarium: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Accessed 6 November 2006.
21. ^ FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, February 1992 [5]
22. ^ http://www.thepriceofsugar.com
23. ^ http://web.amnesty.org/report2006/dom-summary-eng
24. ^ 4. Background: The Black Struggle For Political Power: Major Forces in the Conflict, in The Killings in South Africa: The Role of the Security Forces and the Response of the State, Human Rights Watch, January 8, 1991. ISBN 0-929692-76-4. Accessed 6 November 2006.
25. ^ Row over 'mother of the nation' Winnie Mandela, The Guardian, January 27, 1989
26. ^ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/November/subcontinent_November535.xml§ion=subcontinent&col=
27. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7093388.stm
28. ^ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/November/subcontinent_November535.xml§ion=subcontinent&col=
29. ^ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/November/subcontinent_November535.xml§ion=subcontinent&col=
30. ^ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/November/subcontinent_November535.xml§ion=subcontinent&col=

• Allen, James (editor), Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Pub: 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1 accompanied by an online photographic survey of the history of lynchings in the United States
• Bancroft, H. H., Popular Tribunals (2 vols., San Francisco, 1887)
• Bernstein, Patricia, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP, Texas A&M University Press (March, 2005), hardcover, ISBN 1-58544-416-2
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1993), ISBN 0-252-06345-7
• Barry A. Crouch, "A Spirit of Lawlessness: White violence, Texas Blacks, 1865-1868," Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 217–26
• Cutler, James E., Lynch Law (New York, 1905)
• Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown : The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House (2002). Hardcover ISBN 0-375-50324-2, softcover ISBN 0-375-75445-8
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. 119–23.
• Ginzburg, Ralph 100 Years Of Lynchings, Black Classic Press (1962, 1988) softcover, ISBN 0-933121-18-0
• J.C.A. Stagg, "The Problem of Klan Violence: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1868-1871," Journal of American Studies 8 (Dec. 1974): 303–18
• Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1995), ISBN 0-252-06413-5
• Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction Harper & Row, 1979
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1900 Mob Rule in New Orleans Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics Gutenberg eBook
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1895 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases Gutenberg eBook
• Wood, Joe, Ugly Water, St. Louis: Lulu (2006). Softcover ISBN 978-1-4116-2218-0

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