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Lynching: A practice under which whites, motivated by extreme racism, would attack black Americans in myriad brutal ways to control them. Between 1882 and 1901, more than 100 people were lynched each year in the United States, and the great majority of them were southern African Americans--numbering nearly 2,000 men and boys killed in those two decades. The wave of mob murder continued unabated in the first two decades of the 20th century, numbering nearly 4,000 people by 1932, before tapering off in the 1930s and 1940s. Two or three people were lynched every week in the nation for over 30 years. Whites used mob violence and lynching to control all kinds of black behavior, from voting to manners and attitudes. Most lynchings happened in rural area and small towns whereas mob violence took place in cities. People were brutally murdered by being hung, burned, beaten, mutilated, dragged behind wagons, and other acts of savage torture. In most cases, the local police allowed the lynchings to occur, and witnesses often included the entire white community. In many cases, the victim's body was cut up for souvenirs. Lynchings were usually justified as community responses to black assaults on white women. In fact, the vast majority of such attacks involved no alleged rape at all, and, typically, the black victims were men and some women who were politically active or economically successful. Many were innocent bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Blacks responded by launching a national movement to pressure Congress to pass Federal anti-lynching legislation, but these legislative attempts suffered defeat year after year due to the power of southern white senators. For a partial map of lynchings during the Jim Crow era, click here. |