Lynching

Lynching, hanging or other types of executions, in punishment of a presumed criminal offense, carried out by self-appointed commissions or mobs, without due process of law. The term lynching is generally believed to be derived from the name of a Virginia justice of the peace, Charles Lynch, who ordered extralegal punishment for Tory acts during the American Revolution (1775-1783). Frontier settlements in the United States often lacked established law enforcement agencies and, instead, exercised summary justice through vigilantes. Western pioneers punished murder, rape, horse thievery, and other capital crimes by resorting to lynching.

Even before the American Civil War (1861-1865), many lynchings took place in Southern states. The violence was usually directed at members of the abolitionist movement or others who worked to end the system of slavery. After the war lynching became a method of terrorism against black people in the South. During the period of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan used lynching to intimidate freed blacks who were voting and assuming political power in many parts of the South. A comprehensive study of vigilante violence estimated that the Klan carried out more than 400 lynchings in the South during the period from 1868 to 1871. Often blacks were lynched because they were presumed to have committed crimes against white people. Investigations by journalist Ida B. Wells showed that in many cases the crimes were exaggerated or did not occur at all. Starting in 1882, when records of lynchings began to be kept, most lynchings occurred in Southern states; after 1886 the number of black victims annually exceeded the number of white victims. Georgia and Mississippi had the largest totals of lynchings; the six New England states had none. From 1882 to 1968 more than 4,700 persons were lynched in the United States, and the majority of them were black. The largest number of lynchings in any one year was 230 in 1892. After World War I (1914-1918), lynching declined considerably. In the 1960s, however, several persons attempting to secure civil rights for blacks in the South met death through the actions of lynch mobs.

In 2005 the United States Senate formally apologized to lynching victims and their descendants for the Senate’s failure to pass antilynching legislation during the 19th and 20th centuries. Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat of Louisiana, was the main sponsor of the legislation.

See also African American History.