Lynching is a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate a group. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.
In the United States, lynchings of African Americans became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era into the 20th century. Lynchings are common in many contemporary societies, particularly in countries with high crime rates such as Brazil, Guatemala and South Africa.
Etymology
The origins of the word "lynch" are obscure, but it likely originated during the American revolution. The verb comes from the phrase "Lynch Law", a term for a punishment without trial. Two Americans during this era are generally credited for coining the phrase: Charles Lynch (1736-1796) and William Lynch,
who both lived in Virginia in the 1780s. Charles Lynch is more likely
to have coined the phrase, as he was known to have used the term in
1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used the term until much
later. There is no evidence that death was imposed as a punishment by
either of the two men. In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered "Lynch's law" to Tories "for Dealing with Negroes, &c."
Charles Lynch was a Virginia Quaker,
planter, and American Revolutionary who headed a county court in
Virginia which imprisoned Loyalist supporters of the British for up to
one year during the war. Although he lacked proper jurisdiction for
detaining these persons, he claimed this right by arguing wartime
necessity. Subsequently, he prevailed upon his friends in the Congress of the Confederation
to pass a law that exonerated him and his associates from wrongdoing.
He was concerned that he might face legal action from one or more of
those he had imprisoned, notwithstanding the American Colonies had won
the war. This action by the Congress provoked controversy, and it was in
connection with this that the term "Lynch law", meaning the assumption
of extrajudicial authority, came into common parlance in the United
States. Lynch was not accused of racist bias. He acquitted blacks
accused of murder on three separate occasions. He was accused, however, of ethnic prejudice in his abuse of Welsh miners.
William Lynch (1742–1820) from Virginia claimed that the phrase was first used in a 1780 compact signed by him and his neighbors in Pittsylvania County. While Edgar Allan Poe claimed that he found this document, it was probably a hoax.
A 17th-century legend of James Lynch fitz Stephen, who was Mayor of Galway in Ireland in 1493, says that when his son was convicted of murder, the mayor hanged him from his own house. The story was proposed by 1904 as the origin of the word "lynch".
It is dismissed by etymologists, both because of the distance in time
and place from the alleged event to the word's later emergence, and
because the incident did not constitute a lynching in the modern sense.
The archaic verb linch, to beat severely with a pliable
instrument, to chastise or to maltreat, has been proposed as the
etymological source; but there is no evidence that the word has survived
into modern times, so this claim is also considered implausible.
History
Rioters breaking into a parish prison during anti-Italian lynchings in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1891
Every society has had forms of extrajudicial punishments, including
murder. The legal and cultural antecedents of American lynching were
carried across the Atlantic by migrants from the British Isles to colonial North America.
Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early modern
Anglo-American legal landscape. Group violence in the British Atlantic
was usually nonlethal in intention and result. In the seventeenth
century, in the context of political turmoil in England and unsettled
social and political conditions in the American colonies, there arose
rebellions and riots that took multiple lives. In the United States, during the decades before the Civil War (sometimes called the Antebellum era), free Blacks, Latinos in the South West, and runaways were the objects of racial lynching.
But lynching attacks on U.S. blacks, especially in the South, increased dramatically in the aftermath of Reconstruction, after slavery
had been abolished and freed men gained the right to vote. The peak of
lynchings occurred in 1892, after southern white Democrats had regained
control of state legislatures. Many incidents were related to economic
troubles and competition. At the turn of the 20th century, southern
states passed new constitutions or legislation which effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites, established segregation of public facilities by race, and separated blacks from common public life and facilities through Jim Crow rules. Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968.
Lynching in the British Empire
during the 19th century coincided with a period of violence which
denied people participation in white-dominated society on the basis of
race after the Emancipation Act of 1833.
United States
Bodies of three men lynched in Georgia, May 1892.
Lynchings took place in the United States both before and after the American Civil War,
most commonly in Southern states and Western frontier settlements and
most frequently in the late 19th century. It was performed without due process of law by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offences. At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis
in 1835, a black man named McIntosh who killed a deputy sheriff while
being taken to jail was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death
on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of over 1,000 people.
In the South in the antebellum era, members of the abolitionist movement or other people who opposed slavery
were sometimes victims of mob violence. The largest lynching during the
war and perhaps the largest lynching in all of U.S. history, was the
lynching of 41 men in the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas
in October 1862. Most of the victims were hanged after an extrajudicial
"trial" but at least fourteen of them did not receive that formality. The men had been accused of insurrection or treason. Five more men were hanged in Decatur, Texas as part of the same sweep.
After the war, southern whites struggled to maintain their social dominance. Secret vigilante and insurgent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings in order to keep whites in power and discourage freedmen from voting, working and getting educated. They also sometimes attacked Northerners, teachers, and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau.
A study of the period from 1868 to 1871 estimates that the KKK was
involved in more than 400 lynchings. The aftermath of the war was a
period of upheaval and social turmoil, in which most white men had been
war veterans. Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched blacks.
In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred.
The lynching of Laura Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911
From the 1890s onwards, the majority of those lynched were black, including at least 159 women. Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites and 3,446 lynchings of blacks.
However, lynchings of members of other ethnic groups, such as Mexicans
and Chinese, were undercounted in the Tuskegee Institute's records. One of the largest mass lynchings in American history occurred in 1891, when a mob lynched eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans, Louisiana, following their acquittal on charges that they had killed the local police chief. The largest lynching was the Chinese massacre of 1871.
Mob violence arose as a means of enforcing white supremacy and it frequently verged on systematic political terrorism. "The Ku Klux Klan, paramilitary
groups, and other whites united by frustration and anger ruthlessly
defended the interests of white supremacy. The magnitude of the
extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns reached
epidemic proportions, leading the historian William Gillette to label it
guerrilla warfare."
Body
of a lynched black male, propped up in a rocking chair for a
photograph, circa 1900. Paint has been applied to his face, circular
disks glued to his cheeks, cotton glued to his face and head, while a
rod props up the victim's head.
During Reconstruction,
the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to control blacks,
forcing them to work for planters and preventing them from exercising
their right to vote. Federal troops and courts enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan.
By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, with fraud, intimidation
and violence at the polls, white Democrats regained nearly total control
of the state legislatures across the South. They passed laws to make
voter registration more complicated, reducing black voters on the rolls.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from 1890 to 1908, ten of
eleven Southern legislatures ratified new constitutions and amendments
to effectively disenfranchise most African Americans and many poor whites through devices such as poll taxes, property and residency requirements, and literacy tests.
Although required of all voters, some provisions were selectively
applied against African Americans. In addition, many states passed grandfather clauses
to exempt white illiterates from literacy tests for a limited period.
The result was that black voters were stripped from registration rolls
and without political recourse. Since they could not vote, they could
not serve on juries. They were without official political voice.
The ideology behind lynching, directly connected with the denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly by Benjamin Tillman, governor of South Carolina and later a United States Senator:
We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.
The lynching of African American Will James in Cairo, Illinois, on November 11, 1909. A crowd of thousands watched the lynching.
Postcard of the 1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings.
Two of the black victims are still hanging while the third is on the
ground. Postcards of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.
Lynchings declined briefly after the takeover in the 1870s. By the
end of the 19th century, with struggles over labor and
disenfranchisement, and continuing agricultural depression, lynchings
rose again. The number of lynchings peaked at the end of the 19th
century, but these kinds of murders continued into the 20th century. Tuskegee Institute
records of lynchings between the years 1880 and 1951 show 3,437
African-American victims, as well as 1,293 white victims. Lynchings were
concentrated in the Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana).
Due to the high rate of lynching, racism, and lack of political
and economic opportunities in the South, many black southerners decided
to live outside the South to escape these conditions. From 1910 to 1940,
1.5 million southern blacks migrated to urban and industrial Northern
cities such as New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Boston, and Pittsburgh during the Great Migration.
The rapid influx of southern blacks into the North disturbed the racial
balance within Northern cities, exacerbating hostility between both
black and white Northerners. Many whites defended their space with
violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward blacks, while many other
whites migrated to more racially homogeneous regions, a process known
as white flight. Overall, blacks in Northern cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life.
Throughout this period, racial tensions exploded, most violently in
Chicago, and lynchings—mob-directed hangings—increased dramatically in
the 1920s.
African Americans resisted through protests, marches, lobbying
Congress, writing of articles, rebuttals of so-called justifications of
lynching, organizing women's groups against lynching, and getting
integrated groups against lynching. African-American playwrights
produced 14 anti-lynching plays between 1916 and 1935, ten of them by
women.
After the release of the movie The Birth of a Nation
(1915), which glorified lynching and the Reconstruction-era Klan, the
Klan re-formed. Unlike its earlier form, it was heavily represented
among urban populations, especially in the Midwest. In response to a large number of mainly Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Klan espoused an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish stance, in addition to exercising the oppression of blacks.
Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took
photographs of what they had done to their victims in order to spread
awareness and fear of their power. Some of those photographs were
published and sold as postcards. In 2000, James Allen published a collection of 145 lynching photos in book form as well as online, with written words and video to accompany the images.
Dyer Bill
The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced to the United States Congress in 1918 by Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri. The bill was passed by the United States House of Representatives in 1922, and in the same year it was given a favorable report by the United States Senate Committee. Its passage was blocked by white Democratic senators from the Solid South, the only representatives elected since the southern states had disenfranchised African Americans around the start of the 20th century. The Dyer Bill influenced later anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill. The Dyer and Costigan Wagner bills were blocked by Senator William Borah (R-ID).
As passed by the House, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill stated:
"To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.... Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase 'mob or riotous assemblage,' when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense."
Decline and Civil Rights Movement
While the frequency of lynching dropped in the 1930s, there was a
spike in 1930 during the Great Depression. For example, in North Texas
and southern Oklahoma alone, four people were lynched in separate
incidents in less than a month. In his book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It?
(1934), Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia
today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Negro boys and why they lynch Negroes." A spike in lynchings occurred after World War II,
as tensions arose after veterans returned home. Whites tried to
re-impose white supremacy over returning black veterans. The last
documented mass lynching occurred in Walton County, Georgia, in 1946,
when two war veterans and their wives were killed by local white
landowners.
By the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement was gaining new momentum. It was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till,
a 14-year-old youth from Chicago who was killed while visiting an uncle
in Mississippi. His mother insisted on having an open-casket funeral so
that people could see how badly her son had been beaten. The black
community throughout the U.S. became mobilized. Vann R. Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy". The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
David Jackson writes that it was the photograph of the "child’s
ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism." Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination in the U.S. Deeming American criticism of Soviet Union human rights abuses at this time as hypocrisy, the Russians responded with "And you are lynching Negroes". In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(2001), the historian Mary L. Dudziak wrote that Soviet Communist
criticism of racial discrimination and violence in the United States
influenced the federal government to support civil rights legislation.
Most, but not all, lynchings ceased by the 1960s. The murder of James Craig Anderson
in Mississippi in 2011 was the last recorded fatal lynching in the
United States. Jasmine Richards was convicted of "lynching" in 2016,
but her conviction was for "taking by means of a riot of any person
from the lawful custody of a peace officer" (California penal code
405a), not for killing anybody.
Civil rights law
Title
18, U.S.C., Section 241, is the civil rights conspiracy statute, which
makes it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure,
oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory, or
district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege
secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States
(or because of his/her having exercised the same) and further makes it
unlawful for two or more persons to go in disguise on the highway or
premises of another person with intent to prevent or hinder his or her
free exercise or enjoyment of such rights. Depending upon the
circumstances of the crime, and any resulting injury, the offense is
punishable by a range of fines and/or imprisonment for any term of years
up to life, or the death penalty.
Felony lynching
The
term 'felony lynching' was used in California law. It described the act
of taking someone out of the custody of a police officer by "means of
riot". It does not refer to the act of lynching, or murder by physical
violence. This statute has been used to charge individuals who have
tried to free someone from police custody. There have been several
notable cases in the twenty-first century, some controversial, when a
black person has attempted to free another black person from police
custody. In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation by Senator Holly Mitchell
removing the word "lynching" from the state's criminal code without
comment after it received unanimous approval in a vote by state
lawmakers. Mitchell stated, "It's been said that strong words should be
reserved for strong concepts, and 'lynching' has such a painful history
for African Americans that the law should only use it for what it is –
murder by mob." The law was otherwise unchanged.
Effects
A 2017
study found that exposure to lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South
"reduced local black voter turnout by roughly 2.5 percentage points."
There was other violence directed at blacks, particularly in campaign
season. Most significantly for voting, from 1890 to 1908, southern
states passed new constitutions and laws that disenfranchised most blacks
due to barriers to voter registration. These actions had major effects,
soon reducing black voter turnout in most of the South to insignificant
amounts.
Another 2017 study found supportive evidence of Stewart Tolnay
and E. M. Beck's claim that lynchings were "due to economic competition
between African American and white cotton workers".
The study found that lynchings were associated with greater black
out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages.
Europe
September Massacres of 1792, in which Parisian mobs killed hundreds of royalist prisoners.
In Britain, a series of race riots broke out in several cities in 1919 between whites and black sailors. In Liverpool,
after a black sailor had been stabbed by two whites in a pub, his
friends attacked the pub in revenge. In response, the police raided
lodging houses with black occupants, accompanied by an "enraged lynch
mob". Charles Wootton, a young black seaman who had not been involved in
the attacks, was chased into the river Mersey and drowned after being pelted with missiles thrown by the mob, who chanted "Let him drown!" The Charles Wootton College in Liverpool was named in his memory.
In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg, a German prisoner of war known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime, was lynched by Nazis in POW Camp 21 in Comrie, Scotland. At the end of the war, five of the perpetrators were hanged at Pentonville Prison – the largest multiple execution in 20th-century Britain.
The situation is less clear with regards to reported "lynchings"
in Germany. Nazi propaganda sometimes tried to depict state-sponsored
violence as spontaneous lynchings. The most notorious instance of this
was "Kristallnacht",
which the government portrayed as the result of "popular wrath" against
Jews, but it was carried out in an organised and planned manner, mainly
by SS
men. Similarly, the approximately 150 confirmed murders of surviving
crew members of crashed Allied aircraft in revenge for what Nazi
propaganda called "Anglo-American bombing terror" were chiefly conducted by German officials and members of the police or the Gestapo,
although civilians sometimes took part in them. The execution of enemy
aircrew without trial in some cases had been ordered by Hitler
personally in May 1944. Publicly it was announced that enemy pilots
would no longer be protected from "public wrath". There were secret
orders issued that prohibited policemen and soldiers from interfering in
favor of the enemy in conflicts between civilians and Allied forces, or
prosecuting civilians who engaged in such acts. In summary,
- "the assaults on crashed allied aviators were not typically acts of revenge for the bombing raids which immediately preceded them. [...] The perpetrators of these assaults were usually National Socialist officials, who did not hesitate to get their own hands dirty. The lynching murder in the sense of self-mobilizing communities or urban quarters was the exception."
Lynching of members of the Turkish Armed Forces occurred in the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt.
Mexico
On November 23, 2004, in the Tlahuac lynching, three Mexican undercover federal agents investigating a narcotics-related crime were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan
(Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and
suspected that they were trying to abduct children from a primary
school. The agents immediately identified themselves but they were held
and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on
fire. The 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 agents were
reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured.
Authorities suspect that the lynching was provoked by the persons who
were being investigated.
Both local and federal authorities had abandoned the agents, saying that
the town was too far away for them to try to intervene. Some officials
said they would provoke a massacre if the authorities tried to rescue
the men from the mob.
Brazil
According to The Wall Street Journal,
"Over the past 60 years, as many as 1.5 million Brazilians have taken
part in lynchings...In Brazil, mobs now kill—or try to kill—more than
one suspected lawbreaker a day, according to University of São Paulo
sociologist José de Souza Martins, Brazil’s leading expert on
lynchings."
Guatemala
In May 2015, a sixteen-year-old girl was lynched in Rio Bravo by a vigilante mob after being accused of involvement in the killing of a taxi driver earlier in the month.
Dominican Republic
Extrajudicial punishment, including lynching, of alleged criminals who committed various crimes, ranging from theft to murder, has some endorsement in Dominican society. According to a 2014 Latinobarómetro survey, the Dominican Republic had the highest rate of acceptance in Latin America of such unlawful measures. These issues are particularly evident in the Northern Region.
Haiti
After the 2010 earthquake the slow distribution of relief supplies and the large number of affected people created concerns about civil unrest, marked by looting and mob justice against suspected looters. In a 2010 news story, CNN reported, "At least 45 people, most of them Vodou priests, have been lynched in Haiti since the beginning of the cholera epidemic by angry mobs blaming them for the spread of the disease, officials said.
South Africa
The practice of whipping and necklacing offenders and political opponents evolved in the 1980s during the apartheid era in South Africa.
Residents of black townships formed "people's courts" and used whip
lashings and deaths by necklacing in order to terrorize fellow blacks
who were seen as collaborators with the government. Necklacing is the torture
and execution of a victim by igniting a kerosene-filled rubber tire
that has been forced around the victim's chest and arms. Necklacing was
used to punish victims who were alleged to be traitors to the black
liberation movement along with their relatives and associates. Sometimes
the "people's courts" made mistakes, or they used the system to punish
those whom the anti-Apartheid movement's leaders opposed. A tremendous controversy arose when the practice was endorsed by Winnie Mandela, then the wife of the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress.
More recently, drug dealers and other gang members have been lynched by People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante organization.
Nigeria
The practice of extrajudicial punishments, including lynching, is referred to as 'jungle justice' in Nigeria. The practice is widespread and "an established part of Nigerian society", predating the existence of the police. Exacted punishments vary between a "muddy treatment", that is, being made to roll in the mud for hours and severe beatings followed by necklacing. The case of the Aluu four
sparked national outrage. The absence of a functioning judicial system
and law enforcement, coupled with corruption are blamed for the
continuing existence of the practice.
Palestinian territories
Palestinian lynch mobs have murdered Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. 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 into the current intifada ... but at much fewer numbers.
In October 2000, two Israeli reservists, serving as drivers, mistakenly entered Ramallah and were killed by a Palestinian crowd. Their bodies were mutilated and dragged to Al-Manara Square in the city center. Palestinian policemen did not prevent, and in some cases actually took part in the lynching.
Israel
On October 12, 2000, the infamous and brutal Ramallah lynching, took place. This happened at the el-Bireh police station, where a Palestinian crowd killed and mutilated the bodies of two Israel Defense Forces reservists, Vadim Norzhich (Nurzhitz) and Yosef "Yossi" Avrahami, who had accidentally entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank
and were taken into custody by Palestinian Authority policemen. The
Israeli reservists were beaten and stabbed. At this point, a Palestinian
(later identified as Aziz Salha), appeared at the window, displaying
his blood-soaked hands to the crowd, which erupted into cheers. The
crowd clapped and cheered as one of the soldier's bodies was then thrown
out the window and stamped and beaten by the frenzied crowd. One of the
two was shot, set on fire, and his head beaten to a pulp. Soon after, the crowd dragged the two mutilated bodies to Al-Manara Square in the city center and began an impromptu victory celebration. Police officers proceeded to try and confiscate footage from reporters.
In July 2014, three Israeli men kidnapped Mohammed Abu Khdeir,
a 16-year-old Palestinian, while he was waiting for dawn Ramadan
prayers outside of his house in Eastern Jerusalem. They forced him into
their car and beat him while driving to the deserted forest area new
Jerusalem, then poured gasoline on him and set him on fire after being
tortured and beat multiple times.
On 30 November 2015, the two minors involved were found guilty of
Khdeirs' murder, and were respectively sentenced to life and 21 years
imprisonment on 4 February. On 3 May 2016, Ben David was sentenced to
life in prison and an additional 20 years.
Afghanistan
On March 19, 2015 in Kabul, Afghanistan a large crowd beat a young woman, Farkhunda, after she was accused by a local mullah of burning a copy of the Quran, Islam's
holy book. Shortly afterwards, a crowd attacked her and beat her to
death. They set the young woman's body on fire on the shore of the Kabul River.
Although it was unclear whether the woman had burned the Quran, police
officials and the clerics in the city defended the lynching, saying that
the crowd had a right to defend their faith at all costs. They warned
the government against taking action against those who had participated
in the lynching. The event was filmed and shared on social media.
The day after the incident six men were arrested on accusations of
lynching, and Afghanistan's government promised to continue the
investigation.
On March 22, 2015, Farkhunda's burial was attended by a large crowd of
Kabul residents; many demanded that she receive justice. A group of
Afghan women carried her coffin, chanted slogans and demanded justice.
India
Indian Whatsapp lynchings in 2017-18
In India,
lynchings may reflect internal tensions between ethnic communities,
communities sometimes lynch accused or suspicious convicts. An example
is the 2006 Kherlanji massacre, where four members of a Dalit caste family were slaughtered by Kunbi caste members in Khairlanji, a village in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra.
Though this incident was reported as an example of "upper" caste
violence against members of a "lower" caste, it was found to be an
example of communal violence. It was retaliation against a family who
had opposed the Eminent Domain seizure of its fields so a road could be
built that would have benefitted the group who murdered them.
The women of the family were paraded naked in public, before being
mutilated and murdered. Sociologists and social scientists reject
attributing racial discrimination to the caste system and attributed
this and similar events to intra-racial ethno-cultural conflicts.
There have been numerous lynchings in relation to cow vigilante violence in India since 2014, mainly involving Hindu mobs lynching Indian Muslims and Dalits. Some notable examples of such attacks include the 2015 Dadri mob lynching, the 2016 Jharkhand mob lynching, and the 2017 Alwar mob lynching. Mob lynching was reported for the third time in Alwar in July 2018, when a group of cow vigilantes killed a 31 year old Muslim man named Rakbar Khan.
In the 2015 Dimapur mob lynching, a mob in Dimapur, Nagaland, broke into a jail and lynched an accused rapist on 5 March 2015 while he was awaiting trial.
Since May 2017, when seven people were lynched in Jharkhand, India has experienced another spate of mob-related violence and killings known as the Indian Whatsapp lynchings following the spread of fake news, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the Whatsapp message service.
In popular culture
"Strange Fruit"
In 1937, Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York,
saw a copy of the photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana. He said
that the photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired him to write the
poem "Strange Fruit". It was published in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses,
in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. This poem was set to
music, also written by Meeropol, and the song was performed and
popularized by Billie Holiday. The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939. The song has been performed by many other singers, including Nina Simone.
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A painting depicting the phases of the murder of the De Witts.
The Hateful Eight
The finale of the 2015 film The Hateful Eight
set in post Civil War America is a detailed and close focused depiction
of the lynching of a white woman, prompting some debate about whether
it is a political commentary on racism and hate in America or if it was
simply created for entertainment value.
de Witt Assassination (The Netherlands, 1672)
Dutch politicians Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis were assassinated by a carefully organised lynch mob in 1672. A Dutch biographial film, Michiel de Ruyter, called Admiral in the English version, depicts the lynching and the background history.
Literature
- Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) describes the lynching of three innocent men in a western town.
- In Tom Rob Smith's third Leo Demidov novel, Agent 6, Jesse Austin (a character patterned after Paul Robeson) recalls a lynching that he witnessed in his youth, which inspired him to embrace Communism and shaped his view of how white audiences in the US perceived him.
- James Patterson's novel Alex Cross's Trial is an investigation of a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan.
Video games
- Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a video game focused on Silas Greaves, who was lynched with his brother by a group of glambers.
