Killing by a mob without legal process, used after Reconstruction as a weapon of racial terror against Black Americans; not a federal crime until 2022.
Lynching is the killing of a person by a mob acting outside the law. From the end of Reconstruction through the mid-twentieth century it was a principal instrument of white supremacy in the United States, a form of public terror that enforced the racial order of Jim Crow. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. A map prepared for the House Judiciary Committee in 1922 showed that Southern states accounted for 88 percent of the lynchings recorded between 1889 and 1921.
Lynch mobs and their defenders claimed to be punishing crime. Ida B. Wells demolished that claim. After a white mob murdered three of her friends in Memphis in 1892, she investigated lynching case by case and showed, in Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), that it was a tool of economic and political terror. In 2020 the Pulitzer Prize Board honored her work with a posthumous special citation.
The campaign for a federal law lasted more than a century. On 20 January 1900 Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, then the only Black member of Congress, introduced H.R. 6963, the first federal antilynching bill; it died in committee. The Dyer bill passed the House on 26 January 1922, but Southern senators obstructed it and threatened a filibuster, and the Senate never acted. Hundreds of later measures failed as well.
The memory of lynching shaped the civil rights movement. The 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, and his mother’s decision to let the world see what had been done to her son, galvanized a generation of activists. On 29 March 2022 President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history.
See also: Jim Crow, Reconstruction, Great Migration, Civil Rights Act of 1964
Sources
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Toward a ‘Temporary Farewell’: Anti-Lynching Legislation.” Link
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Red Record of Lynching Map.” Link
- The White House, “Remarks by President Biden at Signing of H.R. 55, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act,” 29 March 2022. Link
- National Park Service, “Ida B. Wells.” Link
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