lynching

(noun)

Execution of a person by mob action without due process of law, especially hanging. Lynchings were means of controlling minority populations by majorities whose supremacy was threatened.

Related Terms

  • Ellis Island
  • Social Gospel Movement

Examples of lynching in the following topics:

  • Ida B. Wells

    • Wells was active in the women's rights, women's suffrage, and anti-lynching movements.
    • A large lynch mob stormed the jail cells and killed the three men.
    • After the lynching of her friends, Wells wrote in Free Speech and Headlight, urging blacks to leave Memphis.
    • The murder also drove Wells to research and document lynchings and their causes.
    • The pamphlets "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "A Red Record" documented her research on a lynching .
  • Washington and DuBois

    • A large lynch mob stormed the jail cells and killed the three men.
    • Wells emphasized the public spectacle of the lynching.
    • She officially started her anti-lynching campaign.
    • In 1892 she published a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and A Red Record, 1892–1894, which documented research on a lynching.
    • Wells lists fourteen pages of statistics concerning lynching done from 1892–1895; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching done in the South.
  • Social Criticism

    • She documented lynching in the United States, exposing it as a means of controlling and/or punishing blacks who dared compete with whites.
    • The pamphlets "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "A Red Record" documented her research on a lynching .
    • Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that Southerners concocted rape as an excuse to hide their real reason for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks, but also their ideas about black inferiority.
  • Social Trends

    • Increased racist violence, including lynchings and race riots, lead to a strong deterioration of living conditions of African Americans in the Southern states.
  • The "Color Line"

    • Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment.
    • The Crisis, the NAACP's journal, continued to wage a campaign against lynching with Du Bois as its editor.
    • In 1915, it published an article with a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914.
  • Racial Friction

    • Beginning about 1915 through the 1930s, in what became known as the Great Migration, more than 1.5 million blacks left the South and moved to Northern cities seeking better living conditions including more work and an escape from the common vigilante practice of lynching, which were extra-judicial killings of blacks for various reasons.
    • In addition, Haynes reported that between January and September 1919, white mobs lynched at least 43 African-Americans, with 16 hanged and others shot, while another eight men were burned at the stake.
    • Haynes said the states had shown themselves "unable or unwilling" to put a stop to lynchings, and seldom prosecuted the murderers.
    • The fact that white men had been lynched in the North as well, he argued, demonstrated the national nature of the overall problem: "It is idle to suppose that murder can be confined to one section of the country or to one race."
  • Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy in the Gilded Age

    • Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased.
    • Between 1889 and 1922, as political disfranchisement and segregation were being established, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) calculates lynchings reached their worst level in history.
  • Harding's Policies

    • Harding had previously spoken out publicly against lynching on October 21, 1921, and he expressed his support for Congressman Leonidas Dyer's federal anti-lynching bill.
  • The "Nadir of Race Relations" and the Great Migration

    • Historians still debate the exact point in time at which the so-called nadir took place, but a commonly cited period spans the late 1880s to just after World War I, when lynchings—extra-judicial killings of black people—were common.
    • Extending from around 1915 through the 1930s, many black people living in the South moved to Northern cities, seeking better living conditions such as more work and an escape from the common vigilante practice of lynching, the extra-judicial killing of black people, commonly by hanging.
  • The Sand-Lot Incident

    • He warned railroad owners that they had three months to fire all of their Chinese workers or "remember Judge Lynch
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