Lynching involves the extralegal
punishment of perceived wrongdoing by a mob. Lynching became pervasive in the
American South late in the nineteenth century and, at its height, from 1880 to 1930,
killed at least eighty-six men in Virginia, all but fifteen of them African
Americans. Many historians believe the term can be traced to Charles Lynch, a Bedford County militia colonel during the American Revolution
(1775–1783) who punished captured Loyalists outside the law. Although a regular feature of the Revolution,
mob violence spiked during the 1830s in response to immigration and tensions over
slavery. In the South, meanwhile,
slavery had long encouraged violence against African Americans, implicating even
non-slaveholding whites who were often called upon to search for escaped slaves.
After the American Civil War
(1861–1865), these two traditions—mob violence and violence against African
Americans—joined to create an epidemic of lynchings that killed probably as many as
4,000 people from 1880 until the mid-twentieth century; the large majority of those
victims were African Americans living in the South. White Virginians, who lynched the
fewest number of people of any southern state, justified the practice by demonizing
African Americans and arguing that the courts provided insufficient protection
against their supposed criminal tendencies. Blacks and whites understood lynching as
a means of enforcing white
supremacy. Vocal black critics, such as the editor John Mitchell Jr., encouraged armed defense but
were ignored by white lawmakers. In the 1920s, after a rash of mob violence, Virginia
passed the South's first antilynching law, although no white person was ever convicted under the
legislation. Mon, 07 Nov 2016 10:09:49 EST
