Lynching
Lynching is a term loosely applied to various forms of violence, usually
murder, conceived by its perpetrators as extra-legal punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably
execution, or used as a
terrorist method of enforcing social domination. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or villified by society. The practice is age-old, e.g. stoning is believed to have started thus 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 enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in periods of threatened anarchy. In early twentieth century it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but essentially and almost peculiarly in America.
Lynch law is sometimes justified by its supporters as the administration of justice (in a social-moral sense, not in law) without the delays and inefficencies 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 more than Justice, swift and certain."
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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 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.
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 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 â€" for a group of private persons who collectively practice lynching â€" 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 of the least likely theories 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.
Lynch Lawcast its pall over the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Before the Civil War, its victims were usually abolitionists and/or persons suspected of aiding escaped slaves, as well as slaves accused of participating in slave revolts. During and after Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (and common citizens) 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 continued to operate throughout the 19th century, declining sharply after 1935: there have been no reported incidents of this type since the late 1960's.
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 their soico-political impact could be significant, as illustrated by the State of Colorado restored in 1901 capital punishment, which it had abolished 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), according to an article published
May 5,
2002 by Dahleen Glanton in the
Chicago Tribune[
1]
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.
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.
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.
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Ramallah lyncher waving blood-covered hands toward the crowd. |
Palestinian lynch mobs have murdered Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel [
2][
3][
4]. 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. [5]
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 Palistinian 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 [
6] and the
BBC [
7]. 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.[
8]. ,
There have also been incidents of Israelis lynching or attempting to lynch Arabs suspected of terrorism, including the beating and killing of an Arab-American tourist after he skidded his car into a Jerusalem bus stop, killing two Israelis [
9], and an attempt on an innocent Arab bystander after a Palestinian suicide bombing[
10]
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. [
11] The practice was endorsed by
Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress.
*
Etymology OnLine* 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*
Ugly Water website*
Without Sanctuary website*
Without Sanctuary, book front cover*
Lyrics to the Billy Holiday song about lynchingStrange Fruit* Allen, James (editor), Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack.
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Pub: 2000) ISBN 0944092691 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 1585444162
* Brundage, W. Fitzhugh,
Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1993), ISBN 0252063457
* 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 0375503242, softcover ISBN 0375754458
* Ginzburg, Ralph
100 Years Of Lynchings, Black Classic Press (1962, 1988) softcover, ISBN 933121-18-0
* Markovitz, Jonathan,
Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (2004), ISBN 0816639957
* 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 0252064135
* 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 9781411622180
