Lynching

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Lynching is a premeditated 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, or to intimidate a group. It is an extreme form of informal group social control such as charivari, riding the rail, and tarring and feathering, and often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. It is to be considered an act of terrorism and punishable by law.^[1][2] Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.^[3][4][5]

In the United States, lynchings of African Americans, typically by hanging, became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era and especially during the decades on either side of the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Southern states were passing new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise African Americans and impose legal segregation and Jim Crow rule. Most lynchings were conducted by white mobs against black victims, often suspects taken from jail before they were tried by all-white juries, or even before arrest.^{[citation needed]} The political message—the promotion of white supremacy and black powerlessness—was an important element of the ritual. Lynchings were photographed and published as postcards, which were popular souvenirs in the U.S., to expand the intimidation of the acts.^[6][7] Victims were sometimes shot, burned alive, or otherwise tortured and mutilated in the public events.^[8] In some cases the mutilated body parts were taken as mementos by the spectators.^[9] Particularly in the West, other minorities—Native Americans, Mexicans and Asians—were also lynched. The South had the states with the highest total numbers of lynchings.

Etymology[edit]

The origins of the word "lynch" are obscure, but it likely originated during the American revolution. The verb comes from the phrase "Lynch Law", a term for a punishment without trial. Two Americans during this era are generally credited for coining the phrase: Charles Lynch and William Lynch, who both lived in Virginia in the 1780s. Charles Lynch has the better claim, as he was known to have used the term in 1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used the term until much later. There is no evidence that death was imposed as a punishment by either of the two men.^[10] In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered "Lynch's law" to Tories "for Dealing with Negroes, &c."^[11]

The origin of the terms lynching and lynch law is traditionally attributed In the United States to Charles Lynch, a Virginia Quaker.^[12]:23ff Charles Lynch (1736–1796) was a Virginia planter and American Revolutionary who headed a county court in Virginia which incarcerated Loyalist supporters of the British for up to one year during the war. While he lacked proper jurisdiction, he claimed this right by arguing wartime necessity. Subsequently, he prevailed upon his friends in the Congress of the Confederation to pass a law that exonerated him and his associates from wrongdoing. He was concerned that he might face legal action from one or more of those so incarcerated, even though the American Colonies had won the war. This action by the Congress provoked controversy, and it was in connection with this that the term "Lynch law", meaning the assumption of extrajudicial authority, came into common parlance in the United States. Lynch was not accused of racist bias. He acquitted blacks accused of murder on three separate occasions.^[13][14] He was accused, however, of ethnic prejudice in his abuse of Welsh miners.^[11]

William Lynch (1742–1820) from Virginia claimed that the phrase was first used in a 1780 compact signed by him and his neighbors in Pittsylvania County. While Edgar Allan Poe claimed that he found this document, it was probably a hoax.^{[citation needed]}

A 17th-century legend of James Lynch fitz Stephen, who was Mayor of Galway in Ireland in 1493, says that when his son was convicted of murder, the mayor hanged him from his own house.^[15] The story was proposed by 1904 as the origin of the word "lynch".^[16] It is dismissed by etymologists, both because of the distance in time and place from the alleged event to the word's later emergence, and because the incident did not constitute a lynching in the modern sense.^[16][10]

The archaic verb linch, to beat severely with a pliable instrument, to chastise or to maltreat, has been proposed as the etymological source; but there is no evidence that the word has survived into modern times, so this claim is also considered implausible.^[12]:16

History[edit]

Rioters breaking into a parish prison during anti-Italian lynchings in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1891

Every society has had forms of extrajudicial punishments, including murder. The legal and cultural antecedents of American lynching were carried across the Atlantic by migrants from the British Isles to colonial North America. Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early modern Anglo-American legal landscape. Group violence in the British Atlantic was usually nonlethal in intention and result. In the seventeenth century, in the context of political turmoil in England and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, there arose rebellions and riots that took multiple lives.^[17] In the United States, during the decades before the Civil War (sometimes called the Antebellum era), free Blacks, Latinos in the South West, and runaways were the objects of racial lynching.^[18]

But lynching attacks on U.S. blacks, especially in the South, increased dramatically in the aftermath of Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and freed men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynchings occurred in 1892, after southern white Democrats had regained control of state legislatures. Many incidents were related to economic troubles and competition. At the turn of the 20th century, southern states passed new constitutions or legislation which effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites, established segregation of public facilities by race, and separated blacks from common public life and facilities through Jim Crow rules. Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968.^[19]

Lynching in the British Empire during the 19th century coincided with a period of violence which denied people participation in white-dominated society on the basis of race after the Emancipation Act of 1833.^[20]

United States[edit]

Bodies of three men lynched in Georgia, May 1892.

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. It was 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.^[21]

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.^[22] The men had been accused of insurrection or treason. Five more men were hanged in Decatur, Texas as part of the same sweep.^[23]

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.^[24]

The lynching of Laura Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911^[25][26]

From the 1890s onwards, the majority of those lynched were black,^[27] including at least 159 women.^[28] Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites and 3,446 lynchings of blacks.^[19][29] However, lynchings of members of other ethnic groups, such as Mexicans and Chinese, were undercounted in the Tuskegee Institute's records.^[30] 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.^[31] The largest lynching 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."^{[32][33][34][35][36]}

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.

During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to control blacks, forcing them to work for planters and preventing them from exercising their right to vote.^{[32][33][34][35][36]} 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 addition, many states passed grandfather clauses to exempt white illiterates from literacy tests for a limited period. The result was that black voters were stripped from registration rolls and without political recourse. Since they could not vote, they could not serve on juries. They were without official political voice.

The ideology behind lynching, directly connected with the denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly by Benjamin Tillman, governor of South Carolina and later a United States Senator:

We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.^[37]

The lynching of African American Will James in Cairo, Illinois, on November 11, 1909. A crowd of ten thousand watched the lynching.^{[38][self-published source]}

Postcard of the 1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings. Two of the black victims are still hanging while the third is on the ground. Postcards of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.^[7]

Lynchings declined briefly after the takeover in the 1870s. By the end of the 19th century, with struggles over labor and disenfranchisement, and continuing agricultural depression, lynchings rose again. The number of lynchings peaked at the end of the 19th century, but these kinds of murders continued into the 20th century. Tuskegee Institute records of lynchings between the years 1880 and 1951 show 3,437 African-American victims, as well as 1,293 white victims. Lynchings were concentrated in the Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana).^[39]

Due to the high rate of lynching, racism, and lack of political and economic opportunities in the South, many black southerners decided to live outside the South to escape these conditions. From 1910 to 1940, 1.5 million southern blacks migrated to urban and industrial Northern cities during the Great Migration such as New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Boston, and Pittsburgh. The rapid influx of southern blacks into the North disturbed the racial balance within Northern cities, exacerbating hostility between both black and white Northerners. Many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward blacks, while many other whites migrated to more racially homogeneous regions, a process known as white flight.^[40] Overall, blacks in Northern cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life.^[41] Throughout this period, racial tensions exploded, most violently in Chicago, and lynchings—mob-directed hangings—increased dramatically in the 1920s.^[41]

African Americans resisted through protests, marches, lobbying Congress, writing of articles, rebuttals of so-called justifications of lynching, organizing women's groups against lynching, and getting integrated groups against lynching. African-American playwrights produced 14 anti-lynching plays between 1916 and 1935, ten of them by women.

After the release of the movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified lynching and the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed. Unlike its earlier form, it was heavily represented among urban populations, especially in the Midwest. In response to a large number of mainly Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Klan espoused an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish stance, in addition to exercising the oppression of blacks.

Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to their victims in order to spread awareness and fear of their power. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards. In 2000, James Allen published a collection of 145 lynching photos in book form as well as online,^[42] with written words and video to accompany the images.

Dyer Bill[edit]

The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced to the United States Congress in 1918 by Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri. The bill was passed by the United States House of Representatives in 1922, and in the same year it was given a favorable report by the United States Senate Committee. Its passage was blocked by white Democratic senators from the Solid South, the only representatives elected since the southern states had disenfranchised African Americans around the start of the 20th century.^[43] The Dyer Bill influenced later anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill.^[44] The Dyer and Costigan Wagner bills were blocked by Senator William Borah (R-ID).^[45]

As passed by the House, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill stated:

"To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.... Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase 'mob or riotous assemblage,' when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense."^[46]

Decline and Civil Rights Movement[edit]

Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched on August 28, 1955. Till was with his uncle Moses Wright in Money, Mississippi when he was beaten and murdered by a mob of white men led by then 24-year-old Roy Bryant when his wife Carolyn falsely accused him of whistling at or touching her. Emmett's mother insisted on an open casket at the widely attended funeral to show one of the many atrocities triggered by racism in the U.S.

While the frequency of lynching dropped in the 1930s, there was a spike in 1930 during the Great Depression. For example, in North Texas and southern Oklahoma alone, four people were lynched in separate incidents in less than a month. In his book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It? (1934), Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Negro boys and why they lynch Negroes."^[47] A spike in lynchings occurred after World War II, as tensions arose after veterans returned home. Whites tried to re-impose white supremacy over returning black veterans. The last documented mass lynching occurred in Walton County, Georgia, in 1946, when two war veterans and their wives were killed by local white landowners.

By the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement was gaining new momentum. It was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old youth from Chicago who was killed while visiting an uncle in Mississippi. His mother insisted on having an open-casket funeral so that people could see how badly her son had been beaten. The black community throughout the U.S. became mobilized.^[48] Vann R. Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy".^[48] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were acquitted by an all-white jury.^[49]

David Jackson writes that it was the photograph of the "child’s ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism."^[50] Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination in the U.S.^[51] Deeming American criticism of Soviet Union human rights abuses at this time as hypocrisy, the Russians responded with "And you are lynching Negroes".^[52] In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2001), the historian Mary L. Dudziak wrote that Soviet Communist criticism of racial discrimination and violence in the United States influenced the federal government to support civil rights legislation.^[53]

Most, but not all, lynchings ceased by the 1960s.^[19][29] The murder of James Craig Anderson in Mississippi in 2011 was the last recorded fatal lynching in the United States. Jasmine Richards was convicted of "lynching" in 2016,^[54] but her conviction was for "taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of a peace officer" (California penal code 405a), not for killing anybody.

Civil rights law[edit]

Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241, is the civil rights conspiracy statute, which makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory, or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States (or because of his/her having exercised the same) and further makes it unlawful for two or more persons to go in disguise on the highway or premises of another person with intent to prevent or hinder his or her free exercise or enjoyment of such rights. Depending upon the circumstances of the crime, and any resulting injury, the offense is punishable by a range of fines and/or imprisonment for any term of years up to life, or the death penalty.^[55]

Felony lynching[edit]

The term 'felony lynching' was used in California law. It described the act of taking someone out of the custody of a police officer by "means of riot". It does not refer to the act of lynching, or murder by physical violence. This statute has been used to charge individuals who have tried to free someone from police custody. There have been several notable cases in the twenty-first century, some controversial, when a black person has attempted to free another black person from police custody.^[56][57] In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation by Senator Holly Mitchell removing the word "lynching" from the state's criminal code without comment after it received unanimous approval in a vote by state lawmakers. Mitchell stated, "It's been said that strong words should be reserved for strong concepts, and 'lynching' has such a painful history for African Americans that the law should only use it for what it is – murder by mob." The law was otherwise unchanged.^[58]

Effects[edit]

A 2017 study found that exposure to lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South "reduced local black voter turnout by roughly 2.5 percentage points."^[59] There was other violence directed at blacks, particularly in campaign season. Most significantly for voting, from 1890 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and laws that disenfranchised most blacks due to barriers to voter registration. These actions had major effects, soon reducing black voter turnout in most of the South to insignificant amounts.

Another 2017 study found supportive evidence of Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck's claim that lynchings were "due to economic competition between African American and white cotton workers".^[60] The study found that lynchings were associated with greater black out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages.^[60]

Europe[edit]

September Massacres of 1792, in which Parisian mobs killed hundreds of royalist prisoners.

In Britain, a series of race riots broke out in several cities in 1919 between whites and black sailors. In Liverpool, after a black sailor had been stabbed by two whites in a pub, his friends attacked the pub in revenge. In response, the police raided lodging houses with black occupants, accompanied by an "enraged lynch mob". Charles Wootton, a young black seaman who had not been involved in the attacks, was chased into the river Mersey and drowned after being pelted with missiles thrown by the mob, who chanted "Let him drown!"^[61] The Charles Wootton College in Liverpool was named in his memory.^[62]

In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg, a German prisoner of war known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime, was lynched by Nazis in POW Camp 21 in Comrie, Scotland. At the end of the war, five of the perpetrators were hanged at Pentonville Prison – the largest multiple execution in 20th-century Britain.^[63]

The situation is less clear with regards to reported "lynchings" in Germany. Nazi propaganda sometimes tried to depict state-sponsored violence as spontaneous lynchings. The most notorious instance of this was "Kristallnacht", which the government portrayed as the result of "popular wrath" against Jews, but it was carried out in an organised and planned manner, mainly by SS men. Similarly, the approximately 150 confirmed murders of surviving crew members of crashed Allied aircraft in revenge for what Nazi propaganda called "Anglo-American bombing terror" were chiefly conducted by German officials and members of the police or the Gestapo, although civilians sometimes took part in them. The execution of enemy aircrew without trial in some cases had been ordered by Hitler personally in May 1944. Publicly it was announced that enemy pilots would no longer be protected from "public wrath". There were secret orders issued that prohibited policemen and soldiers from interfering in favor of the enemy in conflicts between civilians and Allied forces, or prosecuting civilians who engaged in such acts.^[64][65] In summary,

"the assaults on crashed allied aviators were not typically acts of revenge for the bombing raids which immediately preceded them. [...] The perpetrators of these assaults were usually National Socialist officials, who did not hesitate to get their own hands dirty. The lynching murder in the sense of self-mobilizing communities or urban quarters was the exception."^[66]

Lynching of members of the Turkish Armed Forces occurred in the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt.^[67]

Mexico[edit]

On November 23, 2004, in the Tlahuac lynching,^[68] three Mexican undercover federal agents investigating a narcotics-related crime were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan (Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and suspected that they were trying to abduct children from a primary school. The agents immediately identified themselves but they were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The incident was covered by the media almost from the beginning, including their pleas for help and their murder.

By the time police rescue units arrived, two of the agents were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect that the lynching was provoked by the persons who were being investigated. Both local and federal authorities had abandoned the agents, saying that the town was too far away for them to try to intervene. Some officials said they would provoke a massacre if the authorities tried to rescue the men from the mob.

Brazil[edit]

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Over the past 60 years, as many as 1.5 million Brazilians have taken part in lynchings...In Brazil, mobs now kill—or try to kill—more than one suspected lawbreaker a day, according to University of São Paulo sociologist José de Souza Martins, Brazil’s leading expert on lynchings."^[69]

Guatemala[edit]

In May 2015, a sixteen-year-old girl was lynched in Rio Bravo by a vigilante mob after being accused of involvement in the killing of a taxi driver earlier in the month.^[70]

Dominican Republic[edit]

Extrajudicial punishment, including lynching, of alleged criminals who committed various crimes, ranging from theft to murder, has some endorsement in Dominican society. According to a 2014 Latinobarómetro survey, the Dominican Republic had the highest rate of acceptance in Latin America of such unlawful measures.^[71][72] These issues are particularly evident in the Northern Region.^[73]

Haiti[edit]

After the 2010 earthquake the slow distribution of relief supplies and the large number of affected people created concerns about civil unrest, marked by looting and mob justice against suspected looters.^{[74][75][76][77][78]} In a 2010 news story, CNN reported, "At least 45 people, most of them Vodou priests, have been lynched in Haiti since the beginning of the cholera epidemic by angry mobs blaming them for the spread of the disease, officials said.^[79]

South Africa[edit]

The practice of whipping and necklacing offenders and political opponents evolved in the 1980s during the apartheid era in South Africa. Residents of black townships formed "people's courts" and used whip lashings and deaths by necklacing in order to terrorize fellow blacks who were seen as collaborators with the government. Necklacing is the torture and execution of a victim by igniting a kerosene-filled rubber tire that has been forced around the victim's chest and arms. Necklacing was used to punish victims who were alleged to be traitors to the black liberation movement along with their relatives and associates. Sometimes the "people's courts" made mistakes, or they used the system to punish those whom the anti-Apartheid movement's leaders opposed.^[80] A tremendous controversy arose when the practice was endorsed by Winnie Mandela, then the wife of the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress.^[81]

More recently, drug dealers and other gang members have been lynched by People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante organization.

Nigeria[edit]

The practice of extrajudicial punishments, including lynching, is referred to as 'jungle justice' in Nigeria.^[82] The practice is widespread and "an established part of Nigerian society", predating the existence of the police.^[82] Exacted punishments vary between a "muddy treatment", that is, being made to roll in the mud for hours^[83] and severe beatings followed by necklacing.^[84] The case of the Aluu four sparked national outrage. The absence of a functioning judicial system and law enforcement, coupled with corruption are blamed for the continuing existence of the practice.^[85][86]

Palestinian territories[edit]

Palestinian lynch mobs have murdered Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.^[87][88][89] According to a Human Rights Watch report from 2001:

During the First Intifada, before the PA was established, hundreds of alleged collaborators were lynched, tortured or killed, at times with the implied support of the PLO. Street killings of alleged collaborators continue into the current intifada ... but at much fewer numbers.^[90]

2000 Ramallah lynching

In October 2000, two Israeli reservists, serving as drivers, mistakenly entered Ramallah and were killed by a Palestinian crowd. Their bodies were mutilated and dragged to Al-Manara Square in the city center. Palestinian policemen did not prevent, and in some cases actually took part in the lynching.^{[91][92][93][94][95]}

Israel[edit]

In July 2014, three Israeli men kidnapped Mohammed Abu Khdeir while he was waiting for dawn Ramadan prayers outside of his house in Eastern Jerusalem. They forced him into their car and beat him while driving to the deserted forest area new Jerusalem, then poured gasoline on him and set him on fire after being tortured and beat multiple times.^[96] On 30 November 2015, the two minors involved were found guilty of Khdeirs' murder, and were respectively sentenced to life and 21 years imprisonment on 4 February. On 3 May 2016, Ben David was sentenced to life in prison and an additional 20 years.^[97]

Afghanistan[edit]

On March 19, 2015 in Kabul, Afghanistan a large crowd beat a young woman, Farkhunda, after she was accused by a local mullah of burning a copy of the Quran, Islam's holy book. Shortly afterwards, a crowd attacked her and beat her to death. They set the young woman's body on fire on the shore of the Kabul River. Although it was unclear whether the woman had burned the Quran, police officials and the clerics in the city defended the lynching, saying that the crowd had a right to defend their faith at all costs. They warned the government against taking action against those who had participated in the lynching.^[98] The event was filmed and shared on social media.^[99] The day after the incident six men were arrested on accusations of lynching, and Afghanistan's government promised to continue the investigation.^[100] On March 22, 2015, Farkhunda's burial was attended by a large crowd of Kabul residents; many demanded that she receive justice. A group of Afghan women carried her coffin, chanted slogans and demanded justice.^[101]

India[edit]

Indian Whatsapp lynchings in 2017-18

In India, lynchings may reflect internal tensions between ethnic communities. An example is the 2006 Kherlanji massacre, where four members of a Dalit caste family were slaughtered by Kunbi caste members in Khairlanji, a village in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra. Though this incident was reported as an example of "upper" caste violence against members of a "lower" caste, it was found to be an example of communal violence. It was retaliation against a family who had opposed the Eminent Domain seizure of its fields so a road could be built that would have benefitted the group who murdered them.^[102] The women of the family were paraded naked in public, before being mutilated and murdered. Sociologists and social scientists reject attributing racial discrimination to the caste system and attributed this and similar events to intra-racial ethno-cultural conflicts.^[103][104]

There have been numerous lynchings in relation to cow vigilante violence in India since 2014,^[105] mainly involving Hindu mobs lynching Indian Muslims^[106][107] and Dalits.^[108][109] Some notable examples of such attacks include the 2015 Dadri mob lynching,^[110] the 2016 Jharkhand mob lynching,^{[111][112][113]} and the 2017 Alwar mob lynching.^[114][115] Mob lynching was reported for the third time in Alwar in July 2018, when a group of cow vigilantes killed a 31 year old Muslim man named Rakbar Khan.^[116]

In the 2015 Dimapur mob lynching, a mob in Dimapur, Nagaland, broke into a jail and lynched an accused rapist on 5 March 2015 while he was awaiting trial.^[117]

Since May 2017, when seven people were lynched in Jharkhand, India has experienced another spate of mob-related violence and killings known as the Indian Whatsapp lynchings following the spread of fake news, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the Whatsapp message service.^[118]

In popular culture[edit]

"Strange Fruit"[edit]

In 1937, Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York, saw a copy of the photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana. He said that the photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired him to write the poem "Strange Fruit".^[119] It was published in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. This poem was set to music, also written by Meeropol, and the song was performed and popularized by Billie Holiday.^[120] The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939.^{[citation needed]} The song has been performed by many other singers, including Nina Simone.

A painting depicting the phases of the murder of the De Witts.

The Hateful Eight[edit]

The finale of the 2015 film The Hateful Eight set in post Civil War America is a detailed and close focused depiction of the lynching of a white woman, prompting some debate about whether it is a political commentary on racism and hate in America or if it was simply created for entertainment value.^[121][122]

de Witt Assassination (The Netherlands, 1672)[edit]

Dutch politicians Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis were assassinated by a carefully organised lynch mob in 1672. A Dutch biographial film, Michiel de Ruyter, called Admiral in the English version, depicts the lynching and the background history.^[123][124]

Literature[edit]

• Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) describes the lynching of three innocent men in a western town.
• In Tom Rob Smith's third Leo Demidov novel, Agent 6, Jesse Austin (a character patterned after Paul Robeson) recalls a lynching that he witnessed in his youth, which inspired him to embrace Communism and shaped his view of how white audiences in the US perceived him.^[125][126]
• James Patterson's novel Alex Cross's Trial is an investigation of a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

• Auslander, Mark, "Holding on to Those Who Can't be Held": Reenacting a Lynching at Moore's Ford, Georgia", Southern Spaces, November 8, 2010.
• "The Real Judge Lynch" (December 1901), The Atlantic Monthly
• Quinones, Sam, True Tales From Another Mexico: the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (University of New Mexico Press): recounts a lynching in a small Mexican town in 1998.
• Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by James Allen, Hilton Als, United States Rep. John Lewis and historian Leon F. Litwack (Twin Palm Publishers: 2000). ISBN 978-0-944092-69-9.
• Etymology OnLine
•  Fleming, Walter Lynwood (1911). "Lynch Law". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 169.
• Gonzales-Day, Ken, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935. Duke University Press, 2006.
• Markovitz, Jonathan, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
• Before the Needles, Executions (and Lynchings) in America Before Lethal Injection. Details of thousands of lynchings
• Houghton Mifflin: The Reader's Companion to American History – Lynching
• Lynchings in the State of Iowa
• Lynchings in America
• Lyrics to "Strange Fruit" a protest song about lynching, written by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday
• The Lynching of Big Steve Long
• Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law, 1893
• NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. New York City: Arno Press, 1919.
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture entry: Lynching in Arkansas
• Smith, Tom. The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans 'Mafia' Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob, crescentcitylynchings.com

Further reading[edit]

• Allen, James (ed.), Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Pub: 2000), ISBN 0-944092-69-1 accompanied by an online photographic survey of the history of lynchings in the United States
• Arellano, Lisa, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community and Nation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
• Bailey, Amy Kate and Stewart E. Tolnay. Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
• Bancroft, H. H., Popular Tribunals (2 vols, San Francisco, 1887).
• Beck, Elwood M. and Stewart E. Tolnay. "The killing fields of the deep south: the market for cotton and the lynching of blacks, 1882–1930." American Sociological Review (1990): 526–539. online
• Berg, Manfred, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago 2011, ISBN 978-1-56663-802-9.
• Bernstein, Patricia, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press (March 2005), hardcover, ISBN 1-58544-416-2
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press (1993), ISBN 0-252-06345-7
• Caballero, Raymond (2015). Lynching Pascual Orozco, Mexican Revolutionary Hero and Paradox. Create Space. ISBN 978-1514382509.
• Crouch, Barry A. "A Spirit of Lawlessness: White violence, Texas Blacks, 1865–1868", Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 217–26.
• Collins, Winfield, The Truth about Lynching and the Negro in the South. New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1918.
• Cutler, James E., Lynch-Law: An Investigation Into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York, 1905)
• Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002).
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. 119–23.
• Finley, Keith M., Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 (Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 2008).
• Ginzburg, Ralph, 100 Years Of Lynchings, Black Classic Press (1962, 1988) softcover, ISBN 0-933121-18-0
• Hill, Karlos K. Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Hill, Karlos K. "Black Vigilantism: The Rise and Decline of African American Lynch Mob Activity in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, 1883–1923," Journal of African American History, 95 no. 1 (Winter 2010): 26–43.
• Ifill, Sherrilyn A., On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. Boston: Beacon Press (2007).
• Nevels, Cynthia Skove, Lynching to Belong: claiming Whiteness though racial violence, Texas A&M Press, 2007.
• Pfeifer, Michael J. (ed.), Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
• Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., The End of American Lynching. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
• Page, Thomas Nelson, "The Lynching of Negroes – Its Cause and Its Prevention," in The Negro: The Southerner's Problem. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904, pp. 86–119.
• Stagg, J. C. A., "The Problem of Klan Violence: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1868–1871," Journal of American Studies 8 (December 1974): 303–18.
• Tolnay, Stewart E. and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press (1995), ISBN 0-252-06413-5
• Trelease, Allen W., White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, Harper & Row, 1979.
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1900, Mob Rule in New Orleans Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics Gutenberg eBook
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1895, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases Gutenberg eBook
• Wood, Amy Louise, "They Never Witnessed Such a Melodrama", Southern Spaces, April 27, 2009.
• Wood, Joe, Ugly Water, St. Louis: Lulu, 2006.
• Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP crusade against lynching, 1909–1950 (1980).

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lynchings.

Look up lynching in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Taking History Personnally, a text on the Marion lynching by Cynthia Carr
• Yes, ISIS Burned a Man Alive: White Americans Did the Same Thing to Black People by the Thousands (Feb. 2015), Dailykos
• Richardson, Dixie Kline. "1891 Lynching Remains a Mystery", Spencer Evening World, Spencer, Indiana, August 4, 2014
• McKee, Robert Guy. 2013. Lynchings in modern Kenya and inequitable access to basic resources: A major human rights scandal and one contributing cause. Web access
• Cotter, Holland, "‘The Legacy of Lynching,’ at the Brooklyn Museum, Documents Violent Racism", New York Times, July 26, 2017.