International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
Lynching involves acting outside the legal system to inflict punishment, often fatal, against individuals perceived as committing some offence against social order. Beyond tarring and feathering in the English mode, lynching in the US has comprised acts of beating, hanging, dragging, torture, mutilation and burning, and has occurred in every region during social, economic and political crises. Although sometimes attacking alleged criminals, lynchers usually targeted members of stigmatised groups, including immigrants, political radicals, religious, sexual and racial minorities. Lynching also was identified with the frontier as a form of Wild West vigilantism. The lynch mob, lynch law and the legendary ‘Judge Lynch’ have become defining figures of US culture.
After the Civil War, white men, often organised through terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, used lynching to reassert their rule over newly emancipated blacks and prevent their assuming the traditional masculine roles of provider, protector and propertyowner.
During the peak of lynching violence, the 1880s to the 1930s in the deep South, at least one lynching a week was recorded, including of women and children (Tolnay and Beck 1995). White crowds celebrated in a carnival atmosphere. This statesanctioned terror was justified by an ideology of southern chivalry, predicated on superior white men protecting fragile white women from beastly black men, as in the D.W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation (1915). Anti-lynching crusader Ida B.Wells-Barnett pointed out that this sexual rationale cast African Americans as unworthy of political rights and economic gains (1997). Lynching thus exposes the violence needed to sustain racial patriarchy based in notions of Anglo-Saxon manhood supremacy.
When possible, African Americans fought the lynchers. From its 1909 founding, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People published annual lynching statistics, lobbied for federal laws, and organised mass protests (Zangrando 1980).
Currently, police brutality and the death penalty can be seen as forms of’legal lynching’ that perpetuate the myth of the dangerous black male.
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