Lynching and Vigilante Justice

Lynching, also referred to as lynch law and Lynch's law, is the illegal execution by a mob of a person suspected of a crime or some other prohibited behavior. Lynching is today a felony in the United States. A separate felony category is second degree lynching (an attempted execution by a mob where the victim survives). The method of execution most frequently associated with lynching is hanging, but that has not always been the case. The law now includes any mob action that could result in death.

Origins of the Concepts

The concept of lynching appears to have started as a reference to executions ordered by Charles Lynch in 1780. Lynch was a militia officer in America's War of Independence and a justice of the peace. He joined with other officers to try men suspected of disloyalty to the new American nation in an unofficial court of their own creation. Executions were ordered and carried out, along with whipping, seizure of property, forced loyalty oaths, and service in the military for those who were not executed. The victims of these summary executions were Tories who maintained loyalty to England. The actions of Lynch and his companions were legitimized when the Virginia General Assembly later approved their actions in 1782. It was these executions that forever linked the name Lynch and the term lynching to the concept of vigilante justice.

The term lynching originated in the eastern part of the United States. The term vigilante originated in the U.S. Southwest. The word vigilante comes [Page 676]from the Latin vigilans, meaning “to watch.” In Spanish and Portuguese the term vigilante means a “watchman.” Unlike someone who commits a lynching, a vigilante is not necessarily a criminal. Vigilante conduct is officially disapproved because of its potential to yield to criminal behavior by the vigilante. Neither “lynch justice” nor “vigilante justice” is held by any recognized authority to be either legal or just.

Political Reaction to the Term Lynching

Although it originally had no racial component, the term lynching has come to describe crimes against African Americans. The special connection between lynching and race began in reference to the murders of both blacks and of abolitionists in the 1830s. In St. Louis in 1836, Elijah Lovejoy published an account of the lynching of an African American man. He also reported on the trial and acquittal of the killers. His report so angered opponents to abolition that his press was destroyed by a white mob. When Lovejoy secured a new press, it was also destroyed and Lovejoy was shot and killed. The motivating factor in both deaths was opposition to freedom for blacks.

After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan began widespread use of lynching and the threat of lynching to try to maintain white supremacy in the post-Civil War South. According to statistics from the Tuskegee Institute, 1886 was the first year in which the number of African Americans lynched exceeded that of whites (although blacks comprised a far smaller percentage of the overall population).

One of the first investigations into lynching was carried out by the editor of a Memphis newspaper, Ida Wells. In 1884 she discovered that during one period 728 black men and women had been lynched by white mobs. Of these deaths, two thirds were for small offenses such as public drunkenness or shoplifting. Lynch law was changing, now being applied based on the race of the alleged offender. When, in March 1892, three African American businessmen were lynched in Memphis, Wells published a condemnation of the murderers and referred to them as lynchers. In response to her article, a white mob destroyed her printing press. At that time the leaders of the mob stated they intended that Wells would share the earlier fate of Elijah Lovejoy, but she was away from Memphis on a trip when the attack occurred.

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