Lynching

The Toll of Lynching

The exact number of lynching victims in the United States is unknowable. Lynchings occurred in the South prior to the Civil War, but there are no systematic records of these killings. Although some lynchings in the late 1800s and early 1900s were public spectacles attended by the press, with souvenir post cards being sold after the event, others occurred in small communities and attracted only fleeting attention, if any, outside the immediate locality. After national public opinion turned strongly against lynching in the 1930s, participants were more likely to make an effort to hide these extralegal killings. That said, the Tuskegee Institute files include more than 4,700 victims, approximately 75% African American, between 1882 and 1968. An educated estimate is that there were likely between 6,000 and 8,000 total victims in U.S. history. The Tuskegee data file on lynching masks the representation of other minorities among lynching victims, because its compilers classified victims as either “black” or “white.” A significant number of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were lynched in Texas, and Native American and Chinese victims were not unknown. In large part reflecting ethnic tensions, 11 Italians were lynched in New Orleans in 1891 because of the belief that they had been involved in the killing of a popular chief of police who was of Irish ethnicity.

Many lynching victims were killed quickly, but others endured torture and other brutalities before being executed by the mob. The prolongation of suffering was mostly an aspect of white mobs' killing of African Americans in the South and was intended as a warning to other African Americans not to challenge their racial subjugation in the region; it was absent from most killings carried out by vigilante groups in the West.

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