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Lynching
4 articles on Lynching
Lynching and Mob Violence
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 5873 Includes: Black Response | BibliographyAmericans invented the word lynching, but not the practice. Mob violence that might be called lynching has appeared throughout history in such diverse locations as ancient Greece, Republican Rome, Africa, China, and early modern Europe and among Native American societies in North America. Newspaper reports in the early twenty-first century have found lynchings in Africa, Iraq, Mexico, and many other countries. Lynchers act in large crowds or small bands and attack all ethnic groups. Newspapers have reported that black people sometimes joined whites in integrated lynch mobs. On other occasions, African Americans formed all-black mobs to lynch other African Americans. White Americans have lynched Mexicans and Mexican Americans in large numbers. One student of lynching in Colorado, Stephen Leonard ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 11441 Includes: Lynching and Mob Violence in the Age of Booker T. Washington. | Black Protest and Federal Intervention. | Race Riots. | Lynching and Mob Violence in the Age of W. E. B. Du Bois. | Lynching and Mob Violence in the Age of Martin Luther King. | Lynching and Mob Violence in the Contemporary World. | BibliographyIn 1885 the Chicago Tribune reported that ninety-seven whites and only seventy-eight “colored” persons had perished at the hands of lynchers. The next year “colored” victims outnumbered whites, seventy-one to sixty-two, according to the Tribune. The following year, 1887, black victims outnumbered white victims nearly two to one. In 1890 the newspaper headlined its annual lynching tally “How the Colored Man Has Suffered.” Lynching had become a word for white racial violence directed at African Americans. Although it is not at all clear whether the nature of mob violence actually changed, it is undeniable that white newspapers’ understanding of mob violence shifted dramatically.The sensational lynching of Henry Smith, reported onNew ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Mob execution, usually by hanging and often accompanied by torture, of alleged criminals, particularly African Americans. Apart from slavery, lynching is perhaps the most horrific chapter in the history of African Americans. Although lynching, defined as execution without the due process of law, has been used against members of many ethnicities, the vast majority of victims have been African American men, mostly in the Southern states, during a fifty-year period following Reconstruction. Despite its stated justification—that lynching is merely a response to crime—in most cases victims had not been convicted of, or even charged with, a specific crime. As historian W. Fitzhugh Brundagehas noted, lynching was not only “a tragic symbol of race relations in the American South” but also “a powerful tool ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1038a form of illegal execution, usually of a person accused of a crime or some type of deviant behavior. Historically, most lynching victims in the United States have been African-American males. However, women, native-born white males, and members of other minority groups (including European immigrants, Chinese, and Hispanics), were also lynched, though in much smaller numbers. Although lynchings are often equated with hanging, other methods that have been used include shooting, burning, and drowning, sometimes followed by the mutilation and/or public display of the corpse. Some lynchings were carried out by large mobs, while others involved groups of only three or four members. White supremacist or nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klanperpetrated some lynchings, but the informal and spontaneous organization of citizens ...
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