Lynching, a form of illegal execution, usually of a person accused of a crime or some type of deviant behavior.Historically, most lynching victims in the United States have been African‐American males. However, women, native‐born white males, and members of other minority groups (including European immigrants, Chinese, and Hispanics), were also lynched, though in much smaller numbers. Although lynchings are often equated with hanging, other methods that have been used include shooting, burning, and drowning, sometimes followed by the mutilation and/or public display of the corpse. Some lynchings were carried out by large mobs, while others involved groups of only three or four members. White supremacist or nativist groups like the
Ku Klux Klan perpetrated some lynchings, but the informal and spontaneous organization of citizens into lynch mobs was more common. Most lynch victims had been accused, but not convicted, of such serious crimes as murder, assault, or rape. Other victims were killed because of transgressions of racial codes such as insulting a white person or using inflammatory language.
Lynchings have occurred throughout U.S. history but have been concentrated more heavily in specific time periods. The number of
African Americans lynched in the
South increased sharply during
Reconstruction as southern whites reacted to the federal occupation of the former Confederacy and to the increasing political and economic power of blacks. Lynchings peaked during the 1890s, when the annual total of victims regularly exceeded eighty. The rate declined during the next four decades, with temporary upswings between 1905 and 1910, and again immediately following
World War I. After 1930 lynchings became relatively rare, though some of the most highly publicized incidents occurred in the 1940s, 1950s, and even as late as the 1960s (for example, the 1955 lynching of the fourteen‐year‐old Emmett Till near Greenwood, Mississippi, and lynchings of Claude Neal, Charles Mack Parker, and
civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner). The number of lynchings of whites followed a different trend, declining through the late 1800s and virtually disappearing by the twentieth century.
Lynching was primarily a southern phenomenon. Mississippi and Georgia claimed significantly more victims than any other state. However, the rate of lynching in relation to the size of the black population was highest in Florida. Outside the Southeast, lynchings were most likely to occur in the
Southwest and
West, though in considerably smaller numbers. Lynchings in the Southwest differed in important respects from those in the Southeast. For example, victims were more likely to be white or Latino and were more often accused of being horse thieves, bandits, or outlaws. Lynchings in the North Central and Northeast states were rare.
Because most lynching victims had been accused of serious crimes, lynching has sometimes been viewed, particularly by southern newspapers and commentators, as a form of “popular justice,” substituting for, or reinforcing the formal criminal justice system. More recently, explanations for lynching have drawn from
social science theory. One theory describes lynchings as a form of aggression resulting from southern whites’ economic frustrations. And, indeed, larger numbers of lynchings did occur during years when the southern economy faltered. Another theoretical perspective views lynching as a form of social control practiced by southern whites when they felt threatened by African Americans. According to this “racial threat” perspective, whites felt threatened when blacks competed with them for political power, economic security, or social status.
The sharp decline in lynchings after the mid‐1920s is attributed by some to improved law enforcement, especially the increased use of patrol cars and radios. Another explanation emphasizes the increasingly critical treatment of lynch‐mob behavior by southern newspapers. Some claim that antilynching organizations played a critical role. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought vigorously against lynching, as did the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching and the Committee on Interracial Cooperation. Activists such as the NAACP's Walter White, Jessie Daniel Ames, and Ida B.
Wells‐Barnett were especially visible opponents of lynching. Still others suggested that increasingly fierce resistance, sometimes armed, by African Americans discouraged mob behavior in whites. Finally, the decline of lynching has also been linked to major social and economic transformations in the South that fundamentally altered the relation between whites and African Americans.
At their peak, lynching and the fear of lynching had a profound effect on the African American population. It posed a deadly danger to those who challenged the privileged position of whites in southern society. It also motivated many blacks to leave the South. While some southern whites persisted in defending lynching as a “necessary evil,” increasing numbers of whites in all regions came to view the phenomenon as a barbaric national embarrassment and moral disgrace. The ample representation of lynching in American fiction, such as in Lillian Smith's
Strange Fruit (1944), and frequent allusion to lynching—real and metaphorical—in discussions of contemporary race relations attest to its lasting influence.
See also
Civil Rights Movement;
Racism;
Segregation, Racial.
Bibliography
Arthur Raper , The Tragedy of Lynching, 1933.
Robert L. Zangrando , The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950, 1980.
James R. McGovern , Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal, 1982.
George C. Wright , Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings,” 1990.
W. Fitzhugh Brundage , Lynchings in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930, 1993.
Stewart E. Tolnay and and E.M. Beck , A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930, 1995.
Stewart E. Tolnay and and E.M. Beck
