Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often, though not necessarily, in the form of a hanging) for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in all societies.
In the United States, where the word lynching likely originated, the practice became widely associated with vigilante justice on the frontier and with mob attacks on African Americans accused of crimes at the hands of whites. The latter became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era, especially during the nadir of American race relations. Black people are thought to be the primary victims of lynching in the U.S. (about 72% of the total).
In Europe, lynching took a very different form. In the late 18th and in the 19th century, Europe went through various revolution and periods of political instability and lynching of political opponents or enemies became the norm during the French Revolution and the 1848 Revolutions. Nobles, perceived enemies, people accused or suspected of treason were targeted by mobs. The practice persisted in the early 20th century in places like the Soviet Union and territories of the former Russian Empire as a consequence of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.
Etymology The origins of the word lynch are obscure, but it likely originated during the American Revolution. The verb comes from the phrase Lynch Law, a term for a punishment without trial. Two Americans during this era are generally credited for coining the phrase: Charles Lynch (1736–1796) and William Lynch (1742–1820), both of whom lived in Virginia in the 1780s. Charles Lynch is more likely to have coined the phrase, as he was known to have used the term in 1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used the term until much later. There is no evidence that death was imposed as a punishment by either of the two men. In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered Lynch's law to Tories "for Dealing with the negroes &c".
Charles Lynch was a Virginia Quaker, planter, and Patriot who headed a county court in Virginia which imprisoned Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War, occasionally imprisoning them for up to a year. Although he lacked proper jurisdiction for detaining these persons, he claimed this right by arguing wartime necessity. Lynch was concerned that he might face legal action from one or more of those whom he had imprisoned, notwithstanding that the Patriots had won the war. In 1780, he persuaded the Continental Congress to pass Lynch's Law to forgive extrajudicial wartime imprisonment of Loyalists. It was in connection with this that the term Lynch law, meaning the assumption of extrajudicial authority, came into common parlance in the United States. Lynch was not accused of racist bias. He acquitted Black people accused of murder on three occasions.University of Chicago, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828) He was accused, however, of ethnic prejudice in his handling of Welsh miners.
William Lynch from Virginia claimed that the phrase was first used in a 1780 compact signed by him and his neighbors in Pittsylvania County.
A 17th-century legend of James Lynch fitz Stephen, who was Mayor of Galway in Ireland in 1493, says that when his son was convicted of murder, the mayor hanged him from his own house. The story was proposed by 1904 as the origin of the word "lynch". It is dismissed by etymologists, both because of the distance in time and place from the alleged event to the word's later emergence, and because the incident did not constitute a lynching in the modern sense.
The archaic verb linch, to beat severely with a pliable instrument, to chastise or to maltreat, has been proposed as the etymological source; but there is no evidence that the word has survived into modern times, so this claim is also considered implausible.
Since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, there has been a false etymology claiming that the word lynching comes from a fictitious William Lynch speech that was given by an especially brutal slaveholder to other slaveholders to explain how to control their slaves. Although a real person named William Lynch might have been the origin of the word lynching, the real life William Lynch definitely did not give this speech, and it is unknown whether the real William Lynch even owned slaves at all.
By country and region Lynchings have taken place in many parts of the world over the centuries.William D. Carrigan, and Christopher Waldrep, eds. Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (University of Virginia Press, 2013)
United States
Lynchings took place in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, most commonly in Southern states and Western frontier settlements and most frequently in the late 19th century. However, race riots and lynchings took place in Northern states in the 20th century following the Great Migration of Black people from the South which disturbed the racial balance within Northern cities, with one such instance of racial violence being the Red Summer of 1919, and the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which portrays lynching as a heroic and justified act, was popular with white audiences nationwide.
Lynchings were often performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses.The Guardian, 'Jim Crow lynchings more widespread than previously thought', Lauren Gambino, February 10, 2015 From 1883 to 1941 there were 4,467 victims of lynching. Of these, 4,027 were male, and 99 female. 341 were of unknown sex but are assumed to be likely male. In terms of ethnicity, 3,265 were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were Native American, ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese. 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 over 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.
Universal suffrage indicated the beginning of mass lynching across southern United States. The rise to mobs of outrage such as the "red shirt" bands began to appear in many southern states at the time of when voting became a right for Black men, a key historical turn of events that gave uprise to lynching. Initially intended as scare tactics, this outrage continued to grow more and more violent to the point of men being taken from their homes, beaten, exiled, and even assassinated.
Mob violence arose as a means of enforcing White supremacy and frequently verged on systematic political terrorism. After the American Civil War, secret white supremacist terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, previously known as the "red-shirt bands", instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings due to a perceived loss of white power in America. Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched Black people in order to instill fear. In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred. The magnitude of the extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns, to prevent Black men from voting, reached epidemic proportions. The ideology behind lynching was directly connected to the denial of political and social equality, as stated forthrightly in 1900 by United States Senator and former governor of South Carolina Benjamin Tillman:
Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to their victims. Souvenir taking, such as the taking of pieces of rope, clothing, branches and sometimes body parts was not uncommon. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards.
Anti-lynching legislation and the civil rights movement The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced to the United States Congress in 1918 by Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri. The bill was passed by the United States House of Representatives in 1922, and in the same year it was given a favorable report by the United States Senate Committee. Its passage was blocked by White Democratic senators from the Solid South, the only representatives elected since the southern states had disenfranchised African Americans around the start of the 20th century.Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000. Accessed March 10, 2008. The Dyer Bill influenced later anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan–Wagner Bill, which was also defeated in the US Senate.Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, pp. 43–44, 54.
The song "Strange Fruit" was composed by Abel Meeropol in 1937, inspired by the photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana. Meeropol said of the photograph, "It haunted me for days." It was published as a poem in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. The poem was set to music, also by Meeropol, and the song was performed and popularized by Billie Holiday. PBS Independent Lens credits the music as well as the words to Meeropol, though Billie Holiday's autobiography and the Spartacus article credit her with co-authoring the song. The song has been performed by many other singers, including Nina Simone.
By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining new momentum. It was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old youth from Chicago who was killed while visiting an uncle in Mississippi. His mother insisted on having an open-casket funeral so that people could see how badly her son had been beaten. The Black community throughout the U.S. became mobilized. Vann R. Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy". The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were acquitted by an all-white jury.Whitfield, Stephen (1991). A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. pp 41–42. JHU Press. David Jackson writes that it was the photograph of the "child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism."
Most lynchings ceased by the 1960s, but even in 2021 there were claims that racist lynchings still happen in the United States, being covered up as suicides.
In 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was opened in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial that commemorates the victims of lynchings in the United States.
On March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022 into law, which classified lynching as a federal hate crime.
Europe