Lynching

Lynching is a form of violence, usually murder, conceived of by its perpetrators as extra-legal punishment for offenders or as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. It is characterized by a summary procedure ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably judicial execution. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old; stoning, for example, is believed to have started long before lapidation was adopted as a judicial form of execution.

"Lynch law" is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to preserve order. The practice has been common in periods of threatened anarchy. In the early twentieth century it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but especially and almost peculiarly in America.

Lynching is sometimes justified by its supporters as the administration of justice (in a social-moral sense, not in law) without the delays and inefficiencies inherent to the legal system.

Etymology

Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920. The back reads, "This was made in the court yard in Center, Texas. He is a 16 year old Black boy. He killed Earl's grandma. She was Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle."

The word "lynching" is recorded in English since 1835, as a verb derived from the earlier expression Lynch law (known since 1811). This phrase is likely named after the Lynch family (see below), whose surname derives either from Old English hlinc "hill" or from Irish Loingseach "sailor," though which member remains disputed.

The most likely eponym for the concept of Lynch law as summary justice is William Lynch, the author of "Lynch's Law," an agreement with the Virginia General Assembly (Virginian state legislature) on September 22, 1782, which allowed Lynch to pursue and punish criminals in Pittsylvania County, without due process of law, because legal proceedings were in practical terms impossible in the area due to the lack of adequate provision of courts.

Others believe the term came into use only with Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia magistrate and officer on the revolutionary side during the American Revolutionary War, who in any case continued William's practice, as the head of a vigilance committee, an irregular court, trying and sentencing to fining and imprisoning petty criminals and pro- British 'Tories' in his district circa 1782.

In these cases only minor punishments were used, mostly corporal punishment, especially flogging. Neither William Lynch nor Charles Lynch ever executed anyone.

Extralegal punishments similar to those adopted by both Lynches continued to be duplicated by others in the newly independent U.S.A. and elsewhere. The term "lynch law" came in to general use as a loosely employed description of efforts to maintain the established order either by the use of actual lynchings against those who would change it, or even their mere threat, which often proved sufficient to silence activists and critics. The term Lynch mob — for a group of private persons who collectively practice lynching — is attested from 1838. Since the Reconstruction Period after the Secession in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. The further narrowing of the meaning to extralegal execution specifically by hanging, is from the 20th century.

An alternative theory of origin arises from a text called the William Lynch Speech, alleged to have been written in 1712, and attributed to one "William Lynch," a Caribbean planter and slave owner. This speech describes a plan to "break" and control slaves using intimidation and other methods. Though the speech is regarded by some historians as a fake, it has been cited numerous times by Louis Farrakhan and many others.

Another suggestion is that it came from Lynchs Creek, South Carolina, where summary justice was also administered to outlaws; some writers even attempted to trace it to Ireland, or to England. One unlikely theory traces it back to 1493 when James Fitzstephens Lynch, mayor and warden of Galway (Ireland), tried and executed his own son, but that would leave a transatlantic, centuries wide gap.

Social characteristics

The circus-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909.

There are often two motives for lynchings. The first is the social aspect: righting some social wrong or perceived social wrong (such as a violation of Jim Crow etiquette). The second is the economic aspect. For example, upon successful lynching of a black farmer or immigrant merchant, the land would be available and the market opened for white Americans. The terror and intimidation produced by lynching can effectively serve as weapons in economic warfare. This motive was particularly prevalent in the post-Civil War South in America. Because many supporters of the Confederacy were barred from holding public positions of power, they sought to assert themselves through this economic warfare, which took the form of lynching the newly empowered African-Americans. A black journalist, Ida B. Wells, discovered in the 1890s that black lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape only about one-third of the time. The most prevalent accusation was murder or attempted murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition and independence of mind. After accusing these people of crimes, the communities then felt justified in lynching them for a supposed public good.

Many lynchings are carried out with participation by law enforcement and government officials. Police might detain a lynching target, then release him into a situation where a lynch mob could easily, and quietly, complete their deed.

Historical examples

United States

Cover of the Atlanta Constitution with Leo Frank

Lynching in the United States has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the American frontier, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement. Originally, lynching meant any extra-judicial punishment, including tarring and feathering and running out of town, but during the 19th century in the United States, it began to be used to refer specifically to murder, usually by hanging.

On the American frontier, where the power of the police and the army was tenuous, lynching was seen by some as a positive alternative to lawlessness. In the Reconstruction-era South, lynching of blacks was used, especially by the first Ku Klux Klan, as a tool for reversing the social changes brought on by Federal occupation. This type of racially motivated lynching continued in the Jim Crow era as a way of enforcing subservience and preventing economic competition, and into the twentieth century as a method of resisting the civil rights movement.

Charles Cora and James Casey are lynched by the Committee of Vigilance, San Francisco, 1856.

Lynch Law—a form of mob violence and putative justice, usually involving (but by no means restricted to) the illegal hanging of suspected criminals—cast its pall over the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Before the Civil War, its victims were usually black slaves and persons suspected of aiding escaped slaves; lynching was mainly a frontier phenomenon. During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to curb what they viewed as excesses within the Radical Republican Reconstruction government. Federal troops operating under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan, and with the end of Reconstruction in 1876, white southerners regained nearly exclusive control of the region's governments and courts. Lynchings declined, but were by no means brought to an end. In 1892, 161 African-Americans were lynched.

A cartoon threatening that the KKK would lynch carpetbaggers. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Independent Monitor, 1868.

After the 1915 release of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed and re-adopted lynching as a means to socially, economically, and politically terrorize and paralyze black populations, in support of a white supremacist status quo. Victims were usually black men, often accused of assaulting or raping whites. Lynch Law declined sharply after 1935, and there have been no reported incidents of this type since the late 1960s.

"A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows" by William Blake.

The murders of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized. It is likely that many more unrecorded lynchings occurred in this period. Lynching statistics were kept only for the 86 years between 1882 and 1968, and were based primarily on newspaper accounts. Yet the socio-political impact of lynchings could be significant, as illustrated by the restoration in 1901 of capital punishment in the state of Colorado (which had abolished it only in 1897) as the result of a lynching outbreak in 1900.

A postcard showing the burned body of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916. Washington, a 17-year-old mentally handicapped farmhand who had confessed to raping and killing a white woman, was castrated, mutilated, and burned alive by a cheering mob including mayor and the chief of police. An observer wrote that "Washington was beaten with shovels and bricks... [he] was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire... Wailing, the boy attempted to climb up the skillet hot chain. For this, the men cut off his fingers." This image is from a postcard, which said on the back, "This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe."

Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism, and innuendo. 3,500 of its victims were African Americans. Lynchings took place in every state except four, but were concentrated in the Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana).

Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done, and those photographs, distributed on postcards, were collected by John Allen who has now published them online , and written words to accompany the shocking images.

Europe

In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the Vehmgerichte in medieval Germany, and of Lydford law, gibbet law or Halifax law, Cowper justice and Jeddart justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain.

The murder of Giuseppe Prina at the hands of a mob

Count Giuseppe Prina, an Italian statesman was killed in the Milan riots of 1814. A furious mob burst into the senate, pillaged its halls and searched for Prina. Not finding him there, the rioters rushed to his house, which they wrecked, and seized the doomed minister, who was discovered in a remote chamber donning a disguise. Over the course of four hours, the angry rioters dragged him about the town, until wounded, mutilated, almost torn to pieces, Prina received his death-blow.

In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg, a German POW known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime in Germany, was lynched by Nazi fanatics in prisoner of war Camp 21 in Comrie, Scotland. After the end of the war, five of the perpetrators were hanged at Pentonville Prison - the largest multiple execution in 20th century Britain. [1]

There are also some personal accounts of lynching in Budapest, Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the occupying Soviets.

Mexico

On November 23 2004, in the Tlahuac lynching, three Mexican undercover federal agents doing a narcotics investigation were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan (Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and mistakenly suspected they were trying to abduct children from a primary school. The policemen identified themselves immediately but were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The whole incident was covered by the media almost from the beginning, including their pleas for help and their murder. By the time police rescue units arrived, two of the policemen were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect the lynching was provoked by the persons being investigated.

Both local and federal authorities abandoned them to their fate, saying the town was too far away to even try to arrive in time and some officials stating they would provoke a massacre if they tried to rescue them from the mob.

Israel, West Bank and Gaza Strip

Palestinian lynch mobs have murdered Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel According to a Human Rights Watch report from 2001:

During the first Intifada, before the PA was established, hundreds of alleged collaborators were lynched, tortured or killed, at times with the implied support of the PLO. Street killings of alleged collaborators continue in the current Intifada (see below) but so far in much fewer numbers.

Israelis have been lynched as well. On October 12, 2000, soon after the outbreak of the second Intifada, Israeli reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami got lost when they had taken a wrong turn into Palestinian territory in Ramallah. They blundered into the funeral procession of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces on the previous day, were captured by Palestinians and taken to a police station. However, a mob gathered outside the police building and broke in, and the two were beaten to in what was described as a "lynching" by Amnesty International and the BBC. During the killings, the pregnant wife of Vadim Norzich called her husband's cell phone, only to be told "your man is dead" by the Palestinian mob. Their bodies were then thrown out of the window into the hands of a mob of Palestinians, who mutilated the bodies beyond recognition.

Bibliography

• Allen, James (editor), Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Pub: 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1 accompanied by an online photographic survey of the history of lynchings in the United States
• Bancroft, H. H., Popular Tribunals (2 vols., San Francisco, 1887)
• Bernstein, Patricia, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP, Texas A&M University Press (March, 2005), hardcover, ISBN 1-58544-416-2
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1993), ISBN 0-252-06345-7
• Curriden, Mark and Leroy Phillips. "Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism" ISBN 978-0385720823
• Cutler, James E., Lynch Law (New York, 1905)
• Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown : The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House (2002). Hardcover ISBN 0-375-50324-2, softcover ISBN 0-375-75445-8
• Ginzburg, Ralph 100 Years Of Lynchings, Black Classic Press (1962, 1988) softcover, ISBN 0-933121-18-0
• Markovitz, Jonathan, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (2004), ISBN 0-8166-3995-7
• Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1995), ISBN 0-252-06413-5
• Tolnay, Stewart E., and Beck, E.M. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
• Truman, Margaret. Harry S. Truman. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973.
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1900 Mob Rule in New Orleans Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics Gutenberg eBook
• Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1895 The Redts Phases Gutenberg eBook
• Wood, Joe, Ugly Water, St. Louis: Lulu (2006). Softcover ISBN 978-1-4116-2218-0
• An account of the 1946 Moore's Ford Bridge lynchings.
• Zinn, Howard. Voices of a People's History of the United States. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004.

External links

• Without Sanctuary website
• Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, James Allen et al
• Houghton Mifflin: The Reader's Companion to American History - Lynching
• Origin of the word Lynch
• Lynchings in the state of Iowa
• The 1856 Committee of Vigilance - A treatment of the San Francisco vigilante movement, sympathetic to the vigilantes.
• The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851, and the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1856 - an opposing perspective
• American Lynching - web site for a documentary; links, bibliographical information, images
• Lynching calendar 1865-1965
• [1868 Lynching of Steve Long and Moyer brotehrs Laramie City, Wyoming]
• Lynching of John Heath in 1884
• Art in response to lynching of Mary Turner in 1919.
• Lynching of Will Brown in Omaha Race Riot of 1919. (Graphic)
• Commission on Interracial Cooperation
• "Lynch Law"—An American Community Enigma, Henry A. Rhodes

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Lynching  ^history
• Lynching_in_the_United_States  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Lynching"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.