Lynching and the Death Penalty What is Lynching? Lynching has always "officially" been illegal, and thus lynching is a form of murder. But because of its historical similarity to legal executions, in most respects it was essentially just the death penalty without the legal process. Lynching usually involved a pretext of crime or “wrongdoing” – the target (usually minority and/or poor) was typically accused (often erroneously) of offending and/or injuring a member of the dominant social group (usually white). Lynching was also usually part of a larger pattern of "terrorism" directed against subordinate groups. It was usually endorsed and/or encouraged by public officials, prominent elites, the local press, etc. The rationale for lynching typically offered by the dominant group was the claim that the victim “deserved it” and this was often accompanied by the claim that the legal system worked too slowly to achieve justice.

Lynching and the Death Penalty Historical target groups in the US differed by region and time periods: In the North, Northeast, and Midwest States major targets included Tories (supporters of England during and following the Revolutionary War) in the late 1700s and early 1800s, immigrants and political/union activists during the period of heavy immigration and industrialization in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, and African Americans who migrated from the south to northern cities after the Civil War. Lynching in these states had mostly ended by 1900, after which lynching was mostly a Southern phenomenon. In the Southern and Border States, major targets before the Civil War included anti-slavery activists and abolitionists (mostly in Border states) and occasionally poor whites and immigrants. After the Civil War, the main targets were freed slaves (about 90%) and poor whites (10%). Lynching in these states decreased after 1900 but continued until the 1950s and 1960s. In the Western States, major targets included Native Americans and Hispanics and recent poor immigrants from the East. Many of these lynchings were related to the Ranchers vs. Farmers wars in the West, and the victims were usually labeled as “outlaws” and thus deserving of their fate. Lynching in these states mostly ended by World War I ( ).

Lynching and the Death Penalty The anti-lynching movement (similar to the DP abolitionist movements) The early anti-lynching movement focused mostly on publicity – emphasizing "racist murders" that were not prosecuted by local authorities (who were often themselves involved in the murders). The founding of the NAACP following the 1908 Springfield Illinois riot changed the focus to Federal intervention. The Dyer Bill, which proposed a Federal law against lynching, was introduced into every session of the US Congress from 1921 to the WWII years. The Dyer Bill passed several times in the House of Representatives but never passed in the Senate because of "filibusters" by racist southern senators who defended lynching. In 1951 the US became the first country to be formally accused of genocide under the post-WW2 United Nations Genocide Convention adopted in The US Civil Rights Congress, in a petition to the UN entitled "We Charge Genocide" argued that by not acting to stop lynching and other forms of violence and discrimination against African Americans and other minorities, the US government had become complicit in racist genocide. This was a huge international embarrassment to the US government and led to more Federal prosecution of lynchings.

Lynching and the Death Penalty The decline of lynching and “Replacement Theories” As the US continued to rapidly urbanize in the late 1800s and early 1900s, lynching decreased, but legal executions of basically the same target groups increased. Some scholars have explained this in terms of “replacement theory” arguing that as time went by “sham trials” - trials involving white racist judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, all-white juries, plus inevitable guilty verdicts followed by executions - were provided to add a veneer of legality to de facto lynchings of basically the same victims. This is the context for the Scottsboro video which illustrates both the close similarities between lynching and the DP and the transition to sham trials. In the South, the whole "package" of repression, exploitation, and terrorism against African Americans changed to a legal form: the "Jim Crow" system of segregation (and the myth of "separate but equal" facilities) and the pre-Furman DP was a key part of this system. Both lynching and the legal DP declined steeply during and after WW2 and both ended at almost exactly the same time in the early 1960s following the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent dismantling of the Jim Crow system.

Lynching and the Death Penalty

The decline of lynching in the US after 1900, by race of victims