Lynching

Lynching is the killing of a person by a group outside the legal system. It typically describes a mob carrying out a public execution to punish someone for a real or supposed offense, or to frighten others. It can also serve as an extreme method of informal social control, often staged as a public spectacle—frequently, though not always, a hanging—to maximize fear. Such mob violence has occurred in societies around the world.

In the United States, where the word "lynching" likely originated, the practice became closely tied to frontier vigilante justice and to mob attacks by white people on African Americans accused of crimes. These attacks became common in the South after Reconstruction, especially during the worst period of American race relations. Black people are believed to have made up about 72% of lynching victims in the U.S.

In Europe, lynching took a different shape. During the late 1700s and the 1800s, periods of revolution and political instability—such as the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848—saw mobs target nobles, perceived enemies, and those accused or suspected of treason. The practice continued into the early 1900s in places like the Soviet Union and former Russian Empire territories, following the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.

**Etymology**

The exact origin of the word "lynch" is unclear, but it likely emerged during the American Revolution. The verb comes from the phrase "Lynch Law," meaning punishment without a trial. Two Virginians from the 1780s are generally credited with coining it: Charles Lynch (1736–1796) and William Lynch (1742–1820). Charles Lynch is the more likely source, as he used the term in 1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used it until much later. There is no evidence that either man imposed death as a punishment. In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered "Lynch's law" to Tories "for Dealing with the negroes &c."

Charles Lynch was a Virginia Quaker, planter, and Patriot who headed a county court that imprisoned Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, sometimes for up to a year. Though he lacked proper legal authority, he justified it as wartime necessity. Worried about possible legal action after the Patriot victory, he persuaded the Continental Congress in 1780 to pass "Lynch's Law," which forgave extrajudicial wartime imprisonment of Loyalists. This is how the term "Lynch law"—meaning the assumption of extrajudicial authority—entered common use in the U.S. Lynch was not accused of racist bias; he acquitted Black people accused of murder on three occasions. He was, however, accused of ethnic prejudice in his handling of Welsh miners.

William Lynch, also from Virginia, claimed the phrase first appeared in a 1780 compact he signed with neighbors in Pittsylvania County.

A 17th-century legend about James Lynch fitz Stephen, Mayor of Galway, Ireland, in 1493, says he hanged his own son from his house after the son was convicted of murder. This story was proposed in 1904 as the word's origin, but etymologists dismiss it due to the gap in time and place and because the incident does not match the modern meaning of lynching.

The archaic verb "linch"—meaning to beat severely with a pliable instrument, to chastise, or to maltreat—has also been suggested as a source, but there is no evidence the word survived into modern times, so this claim is considered unlikely.

Since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, a false etymology has circulated claiming the word comes from a fictitious speech by a brutal slaveholder named William Lynch, explaining how to control slaves. While a real William Lynch might be the origin of the word, he definitely did not give this speech, and it is unknown whether he even owned slaves.

**By country and region**

Lynchings have occurred in many parts of the world over centuries.

**United States**

Lynchings happened in the U.S. both before and after the Civil War, most often in Southern states and Western frontier settlements, and most frequently in the late 1800s. They were typically carried out by self-appointed groups, mobs, or vigilantes as punishment for presumed crimes. From 1883 to 1941, there were 4,467 lynching victims. Of these, 4,027 were male and 99 female; 341 were of unknown sex but assumed likely male. By ethnicity, 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were Native American, ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese. The first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, involved a Black man named McIntosh who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail. He was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a downtown corner lot before a crowd of over 1,000 people.