Definition
Lynching is the killing of a person by an extralegal mob, typically without trial, often by hanging or burning, and often staged as public spectacle. In the U.S., the term refers above all to the campaign of mob killings of African Americans that ran from the end of Reconstruction through the mid-twentieth century.
The Equal Justice Initiative has documented at least 4,400 lynchings of Black Americans between 1877 and 1950 across twelve Southern states — a figure that does not count similar killings in the West and Midwest, nor the larger universe of non-fatal mob attacks. Lynchings peaked in the 1890s but continued, sporadically, into the 1960s.
Why it matters
How it works
The trigger could be anything. Allegations of murder or sexual assault were common, but lynchings followed accusations of theft, "insolence," labor organizing, success in business, the wrong glance at a white woman, or no accusation at all. Investigations rarely preceded the killing; in many cases the alleged offender was seized from a jail by a mob the sheriff had alerted. In other cases the mob hunted for any Black man it could find in retaliation.
The public character of the killing was the point. Notices were sometimes printed in advance. Photographers were called. Souvenirs — postcards, body parts — were taken and traded. Audiences included families with children. The spectacle communicated, by performance rather than statute, the conditions of caste — that Black life was contingent on the consent of the white community, and that any Black assertion of equality could be terminally answered.
Anti-lynching organizing was led most prominently by Ida B. Wells, whose 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors and 1895 The Red Record compiled lynching cases and dismantled the standard "defending white womanhood" justification by showing it absent from the great majority of cases. The NAACP, founded in 1909, made lynching a central campaign — flying a flag from its New York headquarters reading "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" after each documented killing. Federal anti-lynching legislation was repeatedly proposed and repeatedly killed by Southern senators using the filibuster; not until 2022 was a federal anti-lynching law (the Emmett Till Antilynching Act) finally enacted.
The relation to the Great Migration is direct. Lynchings, and their aftermaths, were among the most common reasons given by migrants for leaving the South. A killing in a county did more than terrify the immediate community; it telegraphed up the railroad lines to extended kin in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, accelerating the departures.