Lynching

SIGNIFICANCE: Through the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, lynching was a primary means of intimidation and control of Black people in the American South.

Lynching, the deadliest form of vigilantism, has a long history in America. At the time of the American Revolution, lynchings were used to punish Tories or British sympathizers. Until the 1850s, lynchings were associated with nonlethal forms of punishment such as beatings and tarring and feathering. In the years immediately before the Civil War, lynching took on its fatal connotation as it was used to suppress enslaved people. Although lynching is often associated with hanging someone, lynching includes all sorts of violent acts, including flogging, dismemberment, torture, burning, and shooting.

History of Lynching

After the Civil War, lynching became more widespread as formerly enslaved people came to be viewed as a threat by their former enslavers. Accurate numbers on lynching are hard to come by, and it was not until 1872 that there was a systematic effort to obtain reliable data. Records kept by the Tuskegee Institute indicate that there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Of those lynched, 3,446 (73 percent) were Black Americans and 1,297 (27 percent) were White. Even these numbers underestimate what most scholars believe to be the actual number of lynchings. A more accurate estimate would be close to 6,000 lynchings.

Lynchings were most prevalent from the 1880s to the 1920s. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there was an average of 150 lynchings per year, with a high of 230 in 1892. Between 1901 and 1910 there was an average of 85 lynchings per year, and from 1911 to 1920 there was an average of 61 per year. The annual average declined to twenty-eight lynchings during the 1920s, to 11 per year during the 1930s, and to only 3 per year during the 1940s. From 1951 to 1985 only 10 lynchings were reported in the United States. Although almost every state experienced lynchings, 82 percent occurred in the South. Mississippi ranked first with 581, followed by Georgia with 530 and Texas with 493.

Grounds for Lynching

Although lynching was often justified as a method of protecting White women from Black rapists, only about 25 percent of lynching victims were even suspected of rape or attempted rape. In most cases, lynching victims were summarily executed before receiving any trial. Their guilt was never established, and not beyond a reasonable doubt. The justification for lynching in the cases of rape was supposedly to protect the White woman from the agony of testifying in court.

Approximately 40 percent of lynchings involved murder or attempted murder allegations. Nine percent involved assault or robbery charges, not capital offenses, and 2 percent involved Black people insulting White people, particularly White women.

The most famous example of a Black man who was lynched for allegedly flirting with a White woman was Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago native, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. Till’s alleged actions violated one of the major cultural taboos in the South, and he would pay with his life. That same day, the woman’s husband and her half-brother abducted Till from the home he was visiting. Three days later, Till’s decomposing body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River. Till had been beaten and shot before his weighted-down body was thrown into the river. The two White men who abducted Till were charged with his murder, but it took an all-White jury less than one hour to acquit them. However, the Till lynching did bring attention to the growing civil rights movement and stirred up opposition to such violence.

The Campaign Against Lynching

Few individuals who participated in lynchings were ever prosecuted. Coroners’ juries repeatedly concluded that the death had come “at the hands of parties unknown.” Oftentimes lynchings took on a festive air, and local newspapers provided complete coverage, sometimes including photographs. In the event someone was arrested for the crime, such as the two White men accused of murdering Emmett Till, they would be found not guilty by all-White juries.

Leading the effort to abolish lynchings were the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, headed by Will Alexander, and Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, led by Jessie Daniel Ames. Ames, one of the leading social reformers in the South, had forty thousand members in her organization within nine years of its establishment in 1930. When alerted about a possible lynching, Ames contacted women in the area who were members of her organization or sympathetic to its objectives.

One of the earliest objectives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization established in 1909, was to pressure the US Congress to pass a federal antilynching bill. On several occasions, the House of Representatives passed such legislation, such as the Dyer antilynching bill in 1922, but it was always filibustered by southern senators when it reached the Senate. During the late 1940s, President Harry S. Truman appointed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). The PCCR urged Congress to pass a federal antilynching law, but without success.

The NAACP met with greater success in attempting to mobilize public opinion against lynching. The NAACP investigated lynchings and often sent special investigators into areas where a lynching had occurred. The NAACP prepared written narratives of the lynchings, including photographs if available, and distributed them to any media outlet that would publicize the lynching. The effort was to try to shame the South into stopping the practice. After an outbreak of renewed violence in opposition to the civil rights movement, including the lynching of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, prosecutors generally became more successful in convicting those guilty of lynching and the practice grew increasingly rare. The US Senate released an official apology in 2005 for its failure to pass antilynching legislation when it may have prevented so much violence.

Federal antilynching legislation was not passed by both houses of Congress until early 2022. In March of that year, President Joe Biden, deeming it an overdue step toward combating persistent racial hatred, signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.

Bibliography

Baker, Ray Stannard. Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era. Introduction by Dewey W. Grantham, Jr. 1908. Reprint. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Print.

Chadbourn, James. Lynching and the Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933. Print.

"History of Lynching in America." NAACP, naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america. Accessed 5 July 2024.

Pfeifer, Michael J. The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014. Print.

Raper, Arthur. The Tragedy of Lynching. 1933. Reprint. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003. Print.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. American Lynching. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. Print.

Sullivan, Kate, and Maegan Vazquez. "Biden Signs Bill Making Lynching a Federal Hate Crime into Law." CNN, 30 Mar. 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/politics/biden-emmett-till-antilynching-act/index.html. Accessed 7 Apr. 2022.

Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. On Lynchings. Introduction by Patricia Hill Collins. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2002. Print.

White, Walter. Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch. 1929. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Print.

Zangrando, Robert. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Print.