page_title: Lynching in the United States
section_title: Other ethnicities
hierarchical_section_title: Lynching in the United States / Disenfranchisement (1877–1917) / Other ethnicities
caption_attribution_description: English: Hanging of Juanita in Downieville
context_page_description: Lynching is premeditated murder committed by a group of people by extrajudicial action. Lynchings in the United States first became common in the Southern United States in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, at which time most of the victims were white men. Lynchings of black people rose in number after the American Civil War during Reconstruction; they declined in the 1930s. Most lynchings were of African-American men in the Southern United States, but women and non-blacks were also lynched, not always in the South. White lynchings of black people also occurred in the Midwestern United States and the border states, especially during the 20th-century Great Migration of black people out of the Southern United States. The purpose was to enforce white supremacy and intimidate black people through racial terrorism. According to Ida B. Wells and Tuskegee University, most lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder. Rape or attempted rape was the second most common accusation; such accusations were often pretexts for lynching black people who violated Jim Crow etiquette or engaged in economic competition with whites. Sociologist Arthur F.
context_section_description: According to the Tuskegee Institute, of the 4,743 people lynched between 1882 and 1968, 1,297 were listed as "white". The Tuskegee Institute, which kept the most complete records, documented victims internally as "Negro", "white", "Chinese", and occasionally as "Mexican" or "Indian", but merged these into only two categories of black or white in the tallies it published. Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims were tallied as white. Particularly in the West, minorities such as Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and others were also lynching victims. The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest was long overlooked in American history, when attention was focused on the treatment of African Americans in the South.
  In modern scholarship, researchers estimate that 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928. Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic was second only to that of the African-American community, which endured an average of 37.1 per 100,000 of population during that period. Between 1848 and 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population.
  After their increased immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century, Italian Americans in the South were recruited for laboring jobs. On March 14, 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans, Louisiana, for their alleged role in the murder of David Hennessy, an ethnic Irish New Orleans police chief. This incident was one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history. A total of twenty Italians were lynched during the 1890s. Although most lynchings of Italian Americans occurred in the South, Italians did not comprise a major portion of immigrants or a major portion of the population as a whole. Isolated lynchings of Italians also occurred in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.
  On February 21, 1909, a riot targeting Greek Americans occurred in Omaha, Nebraska. Many Greeks were looted, beaten and businesses were burnt.
  Between the 1830s and 1850s the majority of those lynched were whites. More whites were lynched than blacks for the years 1882–1885. By 1890s, the number of blacks lynched yearly grew to a number significantly more than that of whites and vast majority of victims were black from then on. White people were mostly lynched in the Western states and territories, although there were over 200 cases in the South. According to the Tuskegee Institute, in 1884 near Georgetown, Colorado, there was one instance of 17 "unknown white men" being hanged as cattle thieves in a single day. In the West, lynchings were often done to establish law and order.
caption: The hanging of Josefa Segovia (Juanita) in Downieville
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