Lynching

"Lynch mob" redirects here. For the band, see Lynch Mob (band).

Lynching is a form of violence, usually murder, conceived of by its perpetrators (who are sometimes known as vigilantes taking the law into their own hands) 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; in this way it echoes the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which was justified by the claim, "Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice."

Word history

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

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 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.

Alternative theories

An alternative theory of origin emerged in the 1990s when a text called the William Lynch Speech, alleged to have been written in 1712, was circulated on the internet and attributed to one "William Lynch", apparently living 30 years before the birth of the historical William. This described a plan to "break" and control slaves using intimidation and other methods. Though the speech is regarded by historians as an obvious fake, it has been cited numerous times by Louis Farrakhan.

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.

United States

Main article: Lynching in the United States

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.

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.

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.

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

Mexico

On November 23 2004, 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, Israeli reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami who got lost when they had taken a wrong turn into Palestinian territory, were taken by Palestinian police to the mob, and were beaten to death in a Ramallah police station 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 murderers. Their bodies were then thrown out of the window into the hands of a mob of Palestinians, who mutilated the bodies beyond recognition. Some Arabic news agencies reported that they were suspected of being undercover agents or assassins, although the western press found no reason to suspect them.

In an incident where an Arab-American tourist skidded his car into a Jerusalem bus stop, killing two Israelis, he was then beaten and killed. There was also reports of attempted harm to an Arab bystander after a Palestinian suicide bombing

South Africa

The practice of whipping and necklacing offenders and political opponents evolved in the 1980s and 1990s under the apartheid regime in South Africa. Residents of black townships lost confidence in the apartheid judicial system and formed "people's courts" that authorized whip lashings and deaths by necklacing. Necklacing is a term used to describe the torture execution of victims by igniting a rubber, kerosene-filled, tire that has been forced around the victim's chest and arms. Necklacing was used to punish numerous victims, including children, who were alleged to be traitors to the black liberation movement as well as relatives and associates of the offenders. The practice was endorsed by Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress.

List of Lynchings in America

The following is a list of lynchings in America, from the NAACP publication, "Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918." New York City: Arno Press, 1969.

• January 1, 1890 - black man, identity unknown, lynched in Turner P. O., AK for being an accessory to murder
• January 1, 1891 - Charles Bealle, black, lynched in Lang, TX for alleged rape
• January 2, 1891 - "Sharp," black, lynched in Neshoba County, MS for robbery
• January 1, 1895 - Barret Scott, lynched in O'Neill, NB for fraud
• January 1, 1895 - three horse thieves, all white, lynched in Kingfisher, OK
• January 1, 1895 - Thomas Blau, white, lynched in Mt. Sterling, KY for alleged murder
• January 1, 1898 - James Jones, black, lynched in MAcon, MS for arson
• January 2, 1898 - black man, identity unknown, lynched in Sherill, AK for alleged theft
• January 1, 1905 - Louis Allwhite, black, lynched in Muldrow, OK for alleged murder
• January 1, 1908 - black man, identity unknown, lynched in Brookhaven, MS for alleged murder
• January 2, 1913 - black man, identity unknown, lynched in Wagoner County, OK for alleged rape

Sources and external links

• Etymology OnLine
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) passim
• Before the Needles, Executions (and Lynchings) in America Before Lethal Injection, Details of thousands of lynchings
• Houghton Mifflin: The Reader's Companion to American History - Lynching
• Origin of the word Lynch
• Lynchings in the State of Iowa
• Lynchings in America
• Without Sanctuary website
• Lyrics to the Billie Holiday song about lynching:Strange Fruit
• The Lynching of Big Steve Long
• Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law, 1893
• NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. New York City: Arno Press, 1919,

Notes and references

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• 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
• 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
• 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
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1895 The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States Gutenberg eBook
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1894 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases Gutenberg eBook
• Wood, Joe, Ugly Water, St. Louis: Lulu (2006). Softcover ISBN 978-1-4116-2218-0