Lynching

Lynching is the execution of a person or persons, by the people of an area without the use of a court trial. Often the people lynched were hanged. Other forms of lynching include being dragged to death behind a car, burning and use of a gun. What makes the execution a lynching is that it is done without a court trial by people who believe the accused is guilty of a crime. Lynchings have been used in the southern states of the United States of America against African Americans during the time of slavery but more commonly after the abolition of slavery during the time of civil rights activism and the times of the various Ku Klux Klans. Lynching continues to be a problem to this day, and is not just limited to southern states. Lynching is murder, and many times the people who do it are never punished. One example of a lynching is that of Jesse Washington.

Lynching in the United States

United States lynchings rose in number after the American Civil War in the early-to-mid 1860s.

Most lynchings went down by the 1950s.

Most lynchings were of African American men in the South. But women were also lynched. Between 1865 and 1965, of around 5,000 Black lynching victims, between 120 and 200 Black women and girls were lynched, or around 3% to 4% of all victims. A small number of women lynching victims were white, some of whom were lynched for associating with African Americans. Other women lynching victims were Indigenous, Latina, or Asian. While women lynching victims were often "successfully demonized", the lynching of white women was more likely to cause "shock, horror, and condemnation" from the general public.

Also, white lynchings of blacks happened in the Midwest and Border States. Sometimes whites were also lynched. There were also lynchings of Native Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans in the West, including California.

References