Lynching

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Lynching Summary

Lynching

Rooted in the broader tradition of vigilantism, the word lynching is primarily associated with the killing of African Americans by white mobs from the Civil War to the late twentieth century. At the height of lynchings in the United States, between 1882 and 1956, more than 4,700 men, women, and children were killed, about 80 percent of them black. In particular, lynching became an integral part of social control in the South, where whites sought to maintain their traditional authority and deny African Americans basic political, social, and economic freedoms. Although the practice declined in the face of gains made during and after the Civil Rights era, occasional lynchings continued up to the turn of the twenty-first century.

Lynching originated in Bedford County, Virginia, around the time of the Revolutionary War when Colonel Charles Lynch and other white males organized informally to apprehend and punishTories and other lawless elements. The term "lynch law" spread throughout the American frontier as lawbreakers were punished with summary whippings, tarring and feathering, and occasionally extralegal hangings or shootings in areas where organized legal systems were scarce. Victims were mostly white and ranged from petty criminals to Catholics and immigrants. After the 1830s, lynchings began to assume a more racial tone in the North in the form of race riots and other mob actions staged in opposition to the movement to end slavery.

The aftermath of a typical lynching.

In the South, lynching did not gain its special association with race until after the Emancipation Proclamation. The economic self-interest of white masters made it illogical for them to kill or seriously harm their slaves, especially in light of the rigid system of slave control then in existence. Exceptions were made in the cases of slave rebellions when white mobs actively sought out and killed suspected African-American participants. Beginning in the Reconstruction Era, freed blacks became more common targets of lynch mobs as justification for the protection of white supremacy, for misdeeds from murder to talking back to whites or other violations of strict social mores. The mythical desire of African-American men to rape white women accounted for less than one-quarter of all lynchings, and that estimate does not take into account the Southern definition of rape which included all sexual relations between the races. Still, white mobs lynched black men accused of rape in such far northern states as Maine, Minnesota, and Washington.

Lynching became an almost wholly southern phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. Most lynchings involved secret hangings and shootings administered by small groups of white men in mainly rural areas. Public lynchings in the South came to involve torture and mutilation and frequently included death by being burned alive instead of strangulation. The public ritual included prior notice of the event, selection of a symbolically significant location, and the presence of a large crowd that included women, children, and evenphotographers. A black school teacher-turned-journalist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, began publicizing southern lynchings in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, in 1892 and until she left the South out of fear for her personal safety. At least a half-dozen black southern women, including a pregnant Georgia woman named Mary Turner and a 13-year-old nanny named Mildrey Brown, were lynched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the South. The Chicago Tribune began a tally of lynchings in 1882 that it continued until 1968. It was joined by Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1912, in a list that came to be called "The Shame of America."

The NAACP began investigating individual lynching cases during World War I. One of the more prominent instances involved Leo Frank, a Jewish factory supervisor who was lynched in 1915 near Marietta, Georgia, for allegedly murdering a 13-year-old white Atlanta girl, Mary Phagan. The identities of the real killer and lynch mob participants remained under speculation and the incident was reexamined in President John F. Kennedy's 1956 Pulitzer-prize winning book, Profiles in Courage and in a short-lived Broadway musical, Parade, in the late 1990s. Other whites and immigrants were lynched by southern mobs, including 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891 and 26 Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas and New Mexico in 1915. The NAACP's first report, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918, released in the race riot year of 1919, influenced the United States House of Representatives to approve by a vote of 230 to 119 the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922. The legislation, introduced by Representative L. C. Dyer of Missouri, asserted the federal government's right to protect individual rights and anticipated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The United States Senate, dominated by southerners such as John Sharp Williams and Pat Harrison of Mississippi, prevented the Dyer Bill from coming to a vote.

Walter Francis White, the NAACP's executive director, published additional lynching research in his 1929 Rope and Faggot: A Legal Assault on Lynching. Various Congressional efforts were made during the 1930s and 1940s, including the 1934 Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Act. Southern legislators, led by Mississippi's Theodore G. Bilbo, filibustered the bill to death. Meanwhile, nine black youths known as the Scotsboro Nine were legally lynched in Alabama in 1931 after they were convicted of the rape of two white women by an all-white jury. There were more than 3,000 hastily-tried "legal" lynchings in the United States between 1880 and 1960 that are not included in the total number of "illegal" lynchings.

The number of lynchings in the South declined after 1935 but never ceased altogether. Southerners were able to prevent serious legislation until the 1960s but the federal courts, led by the United States Supreme Court in the 1951 Williams v. United States, reaf-firmed that federal law, including the Civil War-era Fourteenth Amendment, forbid local and state law enforcement officials from depriving citizens of individual rights. Vocal opposition to lynching from inside and outside of the South contributed to its decline. Actor Paul Robeson met with President Harry Truman as part of a crusade to end lynching in 1946. Nevertheless, sporadic lynchings continued. A 14-year-old Chicago youth, Emmett Till, was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman while a black veteran, Mack Charles Parker, was shot to death in the same state in 1959 while awaiting trial for the alleged rape of a white woman.

A Ku Klux Klansman, Henry Francis Hays, was convicted and executed for the random lynching of a 19-year-old African-American man, Michael Donald, in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. The victim's mother, Beulah Mae Donald, won a $7 million civil suit against the Klan in 1987 for the wrongful death of her son, the first such case in the Klan's long history. In 1998, a 49-year-old unemployed African-American man, James Byrd, Jr., was chained and dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, in what authorities termed a "backwoods lynching." And a "Redneck Shop" opened in Laurens, South Carolina, in 1996, specializing in Ku Klux Klan memorabilia including lynching photographs and t-shirts reading "Original Boys in the Hood." Clearly racism, the root cause of lynching, remains in America.