lynching

lynching, a form of violence in which a mob, under the pretext of administering justice without trial, executes a presumed offender, often after inflicting torture and corporal mutilation. The term lynch law refers to a self-constituted court that imposes sentence on a person without due process of law. Both terms are derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736–96), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace who, during the American Revolution, headed an irregular court formed to punish loyalists.

Historically, the fehmic courts of medieval Germany imposed some punishments that involved lynching, as did the Halifax gibbet law (execution of those guilty of theft valued over a specific amount) and Cowper justice (trial after execution) in the border districts of England. Resembling these cases were the Santa Hermandad constabulary in medieval Spain and pogroms directed against Jews in Russia and Poland, although in these cases there was support from legally constituted authorities.

(Read Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s article, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” published in The Independent, vol. 53, issue 2737, pp. 1133–36 (May 16, 1901))

Vigilante justice has been practiced in many countries under unsettled conditions whenever informally organized groups have attempted to supplement or replace legal procedure or to fill the void where institutional justice did not yet exist. Such conditions commonly give rise to acts of genocide. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were Black. Lynching continued to be associated with U.S. racial unrest during the 1950s and ’60s, when civil rights workers and advocates were threatened and in some cases killed by mobs.