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.

In the U.S., lynching was carried on frequently for decades after the Civil War, and was particularly applied to people of color in the Southern states where slavery had existed.

As an example, the U.S. state of Tennessee had 251 confirmed lynchings between the years of 1882 and 1940, with 47 white victims and 204 African American victims. There exists an online catalog of the names/dates/locations of confirmed lynching victims in the state. During those years (1882-1940), annually an average of nearly one white person was lynched and about four black people were lynched. It is safe to say that blacks, and sometimes white people who befriended blacks, lived in fear of becoming a target themselves.

By contrast, the U.S. state of New Jersey only ever had two confirmed lynchings.

Even after anti-lynching laws and the civil rights movement stopped overt acts of lynching, it is worth noting that public enforcement of racist norms continued across the U.S. South. As an example, around 1970 a white woman was living in a rural Mississippi town next to the hospital where her husband worked. She saw that a black woman who worked in the hospital cafeteria was keeping a 4-year-old boy in a hot car one day because for lack of a baby-sitter, so the white woman took the boy to her house for a few hours. That evening, her husband came home having been warned by the hospital administrator, in crude language, that he would lose his job if his wife continued to associate with blacks.