Lynching
Lynching, the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently against African-American men in the Southern US from 1890 to the 1920s with a peak in 1892. Lynchings were also very common in the Old West, where victims were primarily men of Mexican and Chinese minorities, although whites were also lynched.[1]
Lynching in the South is associated with the imposition of white supremacy by whites in the late 19th century following Reconstruction. The granting of U.S. Constitutional rights to freedmen after the American Civil War during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) aroused anxieties among white Southerners, who were not ready to concede such social status to African Americans.
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More than 85 percent of the estimated 5,000 lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. 1892 was a peak year when 161 African Americans were lynched. The passage of Jim Crow laws, beginning in the 1890s, completed the revival of white supremacy in the South. Terror and lynching were used to enforce both these formal laws and a variety of unwritten rules of conduct meant to assert white domination. In most years from 1889 to 1923, 50 to 100 lynchings occurred annually across the South.
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In Duluth, Minnesota, on June 15, 1920, three young African-American traveling circus workers were lynched after having been accused of having raped a white woman and jailed pending a grand jury. A physician's subsequent examination of the woman found no evidence of rape or assault. The alleged "motive" and action by a mob were consistent with the "community policing" model. The book, The Lynchings in Duluth (2000) by Michael Fedo has documented the events.[31]
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Tuskegee remains the single most complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882. As of 1959, which was the last time that their annual Lynch Report was published, a total of 4,733 persons had died as a result of lynching since 1882. To quote the report,
"Except for 1955, when three lynchings were reported in Mississippi, none has been recorded at Tuskegee since 1951. In 1945, 1947, and 1951, only one case per year was reported. The most recent case reported by the institute as a lynching was that of Emmett Till, 14, a Negro who was beaten, shot to death, and thrown into a river at Greenwood, Mississippi on August 28, 1955...For a period of 65 years ending in 1947, at least one lynching was reported each year. The most for any year was 231 in 1892. From 1882 to 1901, lynchings averaged more than 150 a year. Since 1924, lynchings have been in a marked decline, never more than 30 cases, which occurred in 1926..."[58]
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Not all lynchings in the United States were targeted against African Americans. Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites as well as the 3,446 lynchings of African Americans during that period.[8][21] By the 1890s and after the start of the 20th century, the vast majority of those lynched were Black people,[22] including at least 159 women.[23] Lynchings of other minority members, such as Mexicans and Chinese, have been shown to have been undercounted in the Tuskegee Institute's records.[24] One of the largest mass lynchings in American history involved eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1891.[25]
