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Lynching
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, skimmington,
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. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.
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. 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.
Victims were sometimes shot, burned alive or otherwise tortured and mutilated in the public events.
In some cases the mutilated body parts were taken as mementos by the spectators. 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 
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. In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered "Lynch's law" to Tories "for Dealing with Negroes,
&c." In the United States, the origin of the terms lynching and lynch law is traditionally attributed to a Virginia Quaker named Charles Lynch.
Charles Lynch 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. He was accused, however, of ethnic prejudice in his abuse of Welsh miners.
William Lynch 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. 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.
The story was proposed by 1904 as the origin of the word "lynch". 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.
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.
History
 [^]  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. In the United States, during the decades before the Civil War, assertive free Blacks,
Latinos in the South West, and runaways were the objects of racial lynching. But lynching attacks on U.S. blacks, especially in the South,
increased dramatically in the aftermath of Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and freedmen 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. 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.
 United States 
 [^]  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. 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.
The men had been accused of insurrection or treason. Five more men were hanged in Decatur, Texas as part of the same sweep. After the war,
southern whites struggled to maintain their social dominance. Secret vigilante
and insurgent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan 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.  [^]  From the 1890s onwards, the majority of those lynched were black, including at least 159 women. Between 1882 and 1968,
the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites and 3,446 lynchings of blacks. However, lynchings of members of other ethnic groups,
such as Mexicans and Chinese, were undercounted in the Tuskegee Institute's records.
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. 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."  [^]  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.
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:  [^]   [^]  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. The rapid influx of blacks into the North
during the Great Migration of the early 20th century 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. Overall,
blacks in Northern cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Throughout this period, racial tensions exploded,
most violently in Chicago, and lynchings—mob-directed hangings—increased dramatically in the 1920s. 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 organizing 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, 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 the massive immigration of people 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, with written words and video to accompany the images.
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