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Lynching is extrajudicial punishment carried out by a mob, usually by hanging. It is an enumerated felony in all states of the United States, defined by some codes of law as "Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person which results in the death of the person," with a 'mob' being defined as "the assemblage of two or more persons, without color or authority of law, for the premeditated purpose and with the premeditated intent of committing an act of violence upon the person of another." Lynching in the second degree is defined as "Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person and from which death does not result." To sustain a conviction for lynching at least some evidence of premeditation must be produced, but "The common intent to do violence" may be formed before or during the assemblage."
Nearly 5,000 African Americans were lynched between 1860 and 1890. In her recent book, Sherrilyn A. Ifill, professor at the University of Maryland, College Park School of Law, investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Her research explores how this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities that either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. Ifill wrote that she was inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and she suggests ways that American communities with histories of racial violence can face this legacy in constructive ways.
The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced to United States Congress in 1918 by Republican Congressman Leonidas C
. Dyer of Missouri. The bill was passed by the United States House of Representatives in 1922 and in the same year given a favorable report by the United States Senate Committee. Passage was blocked by white Democratic senators from the Solid South, the only representatives elected since southern states disfranchised African Americans at the turn of the century. The Dyer Bill influenced later anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill.
The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill as it appeared in 1922 stated: "To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.... Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase 'mob or riotous assemblage,' when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense."
Lynching during the late 19th century in the United States, Great Britain and colonies, coincided with a period of violence which denied people participation in white-dominated society on the basis of race or gender after the Emancipation Act of 1833.
Etymology In the United States, the origin of term "lynching" or "lynch law" is traditionally attributed to a Virginia Quaker named Charles Lynch. [Cutler, James E., Lynch Law (New York, 1905)]
- Charles Lynch (1736–1796), a Virginia planter and American Revolutionary who headed a county court in Virginia which punished Loyalist supporters of the British.
The following are several improbable suggested sources of the word's origin:
- William Lynch (1742–1820) from Virginia claimed that the phrase was first used for a 1780 compact signed by him and his neighbors in Pittsylvania County.
- James Lynch Fitzstephen from Galway, Ireland, who was the Mayor of Galway when he hanged his own son from the balcony of his house after convicting him of the murder of a Spanish visitor in 1493 .
- Lingchi, a Chinese form of execution used from roughly AD 900 to 1905 .
- Archaic verb linch; to beat severely with a pliable instrument, to chastise or to maltreat.
There is little actual doubt as to where the term originates. During the Revolutionary War, Judge Charles Lynch imprisoned activists who were loyal to the British and who threatened the colonists' military situation.
"In passing these sentences, comparatively mild though they were, the county court was transcending its powers; the General Court alone had jurisdiction in cases of treason. After the war, therefore, the Tories that had suffered at his hands threatened to prosecute Colonel Lynch and his friends, and the affair attracted wide attention. To avoid the trouble of a lawsuit, Lynch had the matter brought up before the legislature, of which he was still a member; and after a long and thorough debate, that aroused the interest of the whole country, the following act was passed : "Whereas divers evil-disposed persons in the year 1780 formed a conspiracy and did actually attempt to levy war against the commonwealth, and it is represented to the present General Assembly . . . that Charles Lynch and other faithful citizens, aided by detachments of volunteers from different parts of the state, did by timely and effectual measures suppress such conspiracy, and whereas the measures taken for that purpose may not be strictly warranted by law although justifiable from the imminence of the danger, Be it therefore enacted that the said Charles Lynch and all other persons whatsoever concerned in suppressing the said conspiracy, or in advising, issueing, or exacting any orders or measures taken for that purpose, stand indemnified and exonerated of and from all pains, penalties, prosecutions, actions, suits, and damages on account thereof, And that if any indictment, prosecution, action or suit shall be laid or brought against them or any of them for any act or thing done therein, the defendant or defendants may plead in bar and give this act in evidence." The proceedings in Bedford which the legislature thus pronounced to be illegal, but justifiable, were imitated in other parts of the state, and came to be known by the name of "Lynch's Law." In justice to Colonel Lynch, it should be remembered that his action was taken at a time when the state was in the throes of a hostile invasion. The General Court, before which the conspirators should have been tried, was temporarily dispersed. Thomas Jefferson, then the governor of the state, was proving himself peculiarly incompetent to fill the position. The whole executive department was in a state of partial paralysis. It was, therefore, no spirit of insubordination or disregard of the law that induced Lynch to act as he did. There were few men living more inclined than this simple Quaker farmer to render due respect in word and deed to the established authorities. But the seed that had been sown sprung up and bore evil fruit... In 1796 he died, at the age of sixty, and was buried at his home on the banks of the Staunton, in a country which he had found a primeval wilderness... and which he left a prosperous, peaceful, and law-abiding community."
Thomas Walker Page."The Real Judge Lynch" (December 1901) The Atlantic Monthly
No person named "Lynch" has any recorded historical connection with the extra-judicial mob execution or murder of African-Americans.
One definition of the lynching describes it as "a systematic localized expression of western imperialism when wedded to mob driven political terrorism, was commonly practiced as an accepted form of suppressing human beings of African descent engaged in resisting overwhelming injustice and outright tyranny in America."[last= Stover ]
United States [] in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1911; she had tried to protect her son, who was lynched together with her. Both had been involved in killing of Sheriff Deputy George H Loney May 1911
Lynching, as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses, performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes without due process of law took place in the United States before the American Civil War and afterwards, from southern states to western frontier settlements. The term "Lynch's Law" (and subsequently "lynch law" and "lynching") apparently originated during the American Revolution when Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace, ordered extralegal punishment for Tory acts. In the South, members of the abolitionist movement or other people opposing slavery were usually targets of lynch mob violence before the Civil War. During the war, Southern Home Guard units sometimes lynched white Southerners whom they suspected of being Unionists or deserters; one example of this was the hanging of Methodist minister Bill Sketoe in the south Alabama town of Newton in December 1864. Similar (fictitious) incidents of extrajudicial murder are portrayed in Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain.
After the war, southern whites lost confidence in the judicial system of the reconstruction and formed groups such as the Ku Klux Klan which instigated extrajudicial killings. A study of the period of 1868 to 1871 estimates that the Ku Klux Klan was involved in more than 400 lynchings. In the aftermath of war it was a period of upheaval and social turmoil. Reasons mobs gave for lynching blacks were crimes they had allegedly committed against whites; however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were exaggerated or did not occur.
Not all lynchings in the United States were targeted against African Americans and committed by the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,293 lynchings of whites.citation needed
Mob violence became a tool for enforcing white supremacy and 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 extralegal violence during election campaigns reached epidemic proportions, leading the historian William Gillette to label it guerilla warfare."[Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of Illinois Press: 1993) ISBN 978-0252063459][Barry A. Crouch, "A Spirit of Lawlessness: White violence, Texas Blacks, 1865-1868," Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 217–26][J.C.A. Stagg, "The Problem of Klan Violence: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1868-1871," Journal of American Studies 8 (Dec. 1974): 303–18][
]Copyright Citations
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