Lynching

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. 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.

Lynchings by U.S. 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.<ref>Lynching statistics from Tuskegee University/ref>

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.