page_title: Lynching
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Lynching / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: "The bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in a rocking chair, blood-spattered clothes, white and dark paint applied to face, circular disks glued to cheeks, cotton glued to face and head, shadow of a man using rod to prop up the victim's head. Circa 1900, location unknown. Gelatin silver paint. Real photo postcard. 5 3/8 x 2 7/8"." (Info quote from p. 165.)
context_page_description: 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 transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.
  In the United States, lynchings of African Americans became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era, especially during the nadir of American race relations. Lynchings are common in many contemporary societies, particularly in countries with high crime rates such as Brazil, Guatemala and South Africa.
context_section_description: 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.  They were often performed without due process of law by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offences.  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.
  In the South in the antebellum era, members of the abolitionist movement or other people who opposed slavery were sometimes victims of mob violence. The largest lynching during the war and perhaps the largest lynching in all of U.S. history, was the lynching of 41 men in the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas in October 1862. Most of the victims were hanged after an extrajudicial "trial" but at least fourteen of them did not receive that formality.  The men had been accused of insurrection or treason.  Five more men were hanged in Decatur, Texas as part of the same sweep.
  After the war, southern whites struggled to maintain their social dominance. Secret vigilante and insurgent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings in order to keep whites in power and discourage freedmen from voting, working and getting educated. They also sometimes attacked Northerners, teachers, and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. A study of the period from 1868 to 1871 estimates that the KKK was involved in more than 400 lynchings. The aftermath of the war was a period of upheaval and social turmoil, in which most white men had been war veterans. Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched blacks. In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred.
  From the 1890s onwards, the majority of those lynched were black, including at least 159 women. Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites and 3,446 lynchings of blacks. However, lynchings of people who were members of other ethnic groups, such as Mexicans and Chinese, were under-counted in the Tuskegee Institute's records. One of the largest mass lynchings in American history occurred in 1891, when a mob lynched eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans, Louisiana, following their acquittal on charges that they had killed the local police chief. One of the largest lynchings was the Chinese massacre of 1871.
  Mob violence arose as a means of enforcing white supremacy and it frequently verged on systematic political terrorism. "The Ku Klux Klan, paramilitary groups, and other whites united by frustration and anger ruthlessly defended the interests of white supremacy. The magnitude of the extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns reached epidemic proportions, leading the historian William Gillette to label it guerrilla warfare."
  During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to control Black people, forcing them to work for planters and preventing them from exercising their right to vote. Federal troops and courts enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan.
  By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, with fraud, intimidation and violence at the polls, white Democrats regained nearly total control of the state legislatures across the South. They passed laws to make voter registration more complicated, reducing black voters on the rolls. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from 1890 to 1908, ten of eleven Southern legislatures ratified new constitutions and amendments to effectively disenfranchise most African Americans and many poor whites through devices such as poll taxes, property and residency requirements, and literacy tests. Although required of all voters, some provisions were selectively applied against African Americans. In addit
caption: Body of a lynched black male, propped up in a rocking chair for a photograph, circa 1900. Paint has been applied to his face, circular disks glued to his cheeks, cotton glued to his face and head, while a rod props up the victim's head.
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