Lynching is the practice whereby a mob–usually several dozen or several hundred persons–takes the law into its own hands in order to injure and kill a person accused of some wrongdoing. Th
From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term “lynching” did not have any racial implications. Targets included Tories, horse thieves, gamblers, and abolitionists. But starting in
From 1889 to 1918 more than 2,400 African Americans were hanged or burned at the stake. Many lynching victims were accused of little more than making “boastful remarks,” “insulting a
On June 15, 1920, police arrest several young black men accused of raping a white woman. That evening, three of them – Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.
Lynching was the practice of murdering, usually by a hanging resulting from extrajudicial mob action. Lynchings in the United States occurred after the American Civil War in the late 1800s, the emanci
Searching through America’s past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout Ameri
Between 1882 and 1930 the American South experienced an epidemic of fatal mob violence that produced more than 3,000 victims, the vast majority of whom were African Americans. More than 450 documented
Twenty year-old Mary Turner, 8 months pregnant at the time and whose husband had been killed in a “lynching rampage” on Sunday, May 19th, made the mistake of publicly objecting to her husb
