Lynching

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A lynching is the murder of an accused person, often preceded by torture, by three or more killers (99% of whom were never punished or even charged with a crime) who acted under the pretext of service to justice without allowing the accused person to undergo a trial. Lynching is murder by mob.

Lynchings were a form of social control whereby a victim's family, friends, and other community members were forced to adopt a public code of silence about the lynching or fear for their own lives. The identity of lynchers was almost always known, and local police often facilitated the act, and local press often praised it.

Mob killings are not just a modern phenomenon but have occurred occasionally all through history in various places. But lynching became a particularly common occurrence for a period of about 80 years in the United States. Before anti-lynching laws brought the practice to a halt in the mid-20th century, lynching was a particular danger to people of color in the Southern states where slavery had existed. The vast majority of all lynchings occurred in the U.S. southern states which had a relatively large proportion of African American residents who had been freed from slavery. Lynching also commonly occurred in states and territories such as Kentucky and Missouri where slavery was in danger of becoming established at the time of the Civil War. As an example, the U.S. state of Mississippi had 581 confirmed lynchings between the years of 1882 and 1940, with 42 white victims and 539 African American victims. This is more than any other state. It is safe to say that blacks in the U.S. South, and sometimes white people who befriended blacks, lived in fear of becoming a target of lynching. In contrast, some states far removed from the South hae no reported lynchings at all.

It is worth noting that, even after the practice of lynching died down, in U.S. states where it had been frequent, racism continued to be enforced by a portion of the population by threatening the livelihood or social acceptance of anyone who fraternized across races. In some cases, death threats were still frequently issued (and violence such as bombings) still continued via the Ku Klux Klan and other secretive white-supremacist, hate-mongering organizations.

U.S. lynchings by state

NOTE: A drawback of the Tuskegee University classification scheme for lynching is that the "white" lynching counts (especially outside the former U.S. slave states) likely included other ethnic groups such as Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, or other immigrant nationalities.[1]

Click on a column header to sort the table by that item.

No  Name  White  Black  Total 
1 Alabama 48 299 347
2 Alaska 0 0 0
3 Arizona 31 0 31
4 Arkansas 58 226 284
5 California 41 2 43
6 Colorado 65 3 68
7 Connecticut 0 0 0
8 Delaware 0 1 1
9 Florida 25 257 282
10 Georgia 39 492 531
11 Hawaii 0 0 0
12 Idaho 20 0 20
13 Illinois 15 19 34
14 Indiana 33 14 47
15 Iowa 17 2 19
16 Kansas 35 19 54
17 Kentucky 63 142 205
18 Louisiana 56 335 391
19 Maine 1 0 1
20 Maryland 2 27 29
21 Massachussetts 0 0 0
22 Michigan 7 1 8
23 Minnesota 5 4 9
24 Mississippi 42 539 581
25 Missouri 53 69 122
26 Montana 82 2 84
27 Nebraska 52 5 57
28 Nevada 6 0 6
29 New Hampshire 0 0 0
30 New Jersey 1 1 2
31 New Mexico 33 3 36
32 New York 1 1 2
33 North Carolina 15 86 101
34 North Dakota 13 3 16
35 Ohio 10 16 26
36 Oklahoma 82 40 122
37 Oregon 20 1 21
38 Pennsylvania 2 6 8
39 Rhode Island 0 0 0
40 South Carolina 4 156 160
41 South Dakota 27 0 27
42 Tennessee 47 204 251
43 Texas 141 352 493
44 Utah 6 2 8
45 Vermont 1 0 1
46 Virginia 17 83 100
47 Washington 25 1 26
48 West Virginia 20 28 48
49 Wisconsin 6 0 6
50 Wyoming 30 5 35
51 TOTAL 1297 3446 4743

NOTE: Contents of the above table is from this template.

Notes

  1. Lynching statistics from Tuskegee University.