Lynching

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Lynching is a form of violence, usually murder, conceived of by its perpetrators as extra legal punishment for offenders or as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. It is characterized by a summary procedure ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably judicial execution. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old; stoning, for example, is believed to have started long before lapidation was adopted as a judicial form of execution.

"Lynch law" is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to preserve order. The practice has been common in periods of threatened anarchy. In the early twentieth century it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but especially and almost peculiarly in America.

Lynching is sometimes justified by its supporters as the administration of justice (in a social-moral sense, not in law) without the delays and inefficiencies inherent to the legal system; in this way it echoes the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which was justified by the claim, "Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice."^[1]

[edit] Etymology

The word "lynching" is recorded in English since 1835, as a verb derived from the earlier expression Lynch law (known since 1811). This phrase is likely named after the Lynch family (see below), whose surname derives either from Old English hlinc "hill" or from Irish Loingseach "sailor", though which member remains disputed.

Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920. The back reads, "This was made in the court yard in Center, Texas. He is a 16 year old Black boy. He killed Earl's grandma. She was Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle."

The most likely eponym for the concept of Lynch law as summary justice is William Lynch, the author of "Lynch's Law", an agreement with the Virginia General Assembly (Virginian state legislature) on September 22, 1782, which allowed Lynch to pursue and punish criminals in Pittsylvania County, without due process of law, because legal proceedings were in practical terms impossible in the area due to the lack of adequate provision of courts.

Others believe the term came into use only with Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia magistrate and officer on the revolutionary side during the American Revolutionary War, who in any case continued William's practice, as the head of a vigilance committee, an irregular court, trying and sentencing to fining and imprisoning petty criminals and pro-British "Tories" in his district circa 1782.

In these cases only minor punishments were used, mostly corporal punishment, especially flogging. Neither William Lynch nor Charles Lynch ever executed anyone.

Extralegal punishments similar to those adopted by both Lynches continued to be duplicated by others in the newly independent U.S.A. and elsewhere. The term "lynch law" came in to general use as a loosely employed description of efforts to maintain the established order either by the use of actual lynchings against those who would change it, or even their mere threat, which often proved sufficient to silence activists and critics. The term Lynch mob — for a group of private persons who collectively practice lynching — is attested from 1838. Since the Reconstruction Period after the Secession in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. The further narrowing of the meaning to extralegal execution specifically by hanging, is from the 20th century.

[edit] Alternative theories

An alternative theory of origin arises from a text called the William Lynch Speech, alleged to have been written in 1712, and attributed to one "William Lynch", a Caribbean planter and slave owner. This speech describes a plan to "break" and control slaves using intimidation and other methods. Though the speech is regarded by some historians as a fake, it has been cited numerous times by Louis Farrakhan and many others.

Another suggestion is that it came from Lynchs Creek, South Carolina, where summary justice was also administered to outlaws; some writers even attempted to trace it to Ireland, or to England. One unlikely theory traces it back to 1493 when James Fitzstephens Lynch, mayor and warden of Galway (Ireland), tried and executed his own son, but that would leave a transatlantic, centuries wide gap.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] United States

Main article: Lynching in the United States

Lynch Law—a form of mob violence and putative justice, usually involving (but by no means restricted to) the illegal hanging of suspected criminals—cast its pall over the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Before the Civil War, its victims were usually black slaves and persons suspected of aiding escaped slaves; lynching was mainly a frontier phenomenon. However, during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to curb what they viewed as excesses within the Radical Republican Reconstruction government. Federal troops operating under the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan, but with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white southerners regained nearly exclusive control of the region's governments and courts. Lynchings declined, but were by no means brought to an end. In 1892, 161 African-Americans were lynched. The largest single lynching incident in America's history was the lynching of 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1892. This incident was popularized in the HBO movie, "Vendetta," staring Christopher Walken.

After the 1915 release of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed and re-adopted lynching as a means to socially, economically, and politically terrorize and paralyze black populations, in support of a white supremacist status quo. Victims were usually black men, often accused of assaulting or raping whites. Jews were the next most common target, most famously, Leo Frank. Lynch Law declined sharply after 1935, and there have been no reported incidents of this type since the late 1960s.

"A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows", an illustration by William Blake to J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).

The murders of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized. It is likely that many more unrecorded lynchings occurred in this period. Lynching statistics were kept only for the 86 years between 1882 and 1968, and were based primarily on newspaper accounts. Yet the socio-political impact of lynchings could be significant, as illustrated by the restoration in 1901 of capital punishment in the state of Colorado (which had abolished it only in 1897) as the result of a lynching outbreak in 1900.

Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism, and innuendo. 3,500 of its victims were African Americans. Lynchings took place in every state except four, but were concentrated in the Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana). ^[2]

Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done, and those photographs, distributed on postcards, were collected by James Allen who has now published them online ^[3], and written words to accompany the shocking images.

[edit] Europe

In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the Vehmgerichte in medieval Germany, and of Lydford law, gibbet law or Halifax law, Cowper justice and Jeddart justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain.

In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg, a German POW known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime in Germany, was lynched by Nazi fanatics in prisoner of war Camp 21 in Comrie, Scotland. After the end of the war, five of the perpetrators were hanged at Pentonville Prison - the largest multiple execution in 20th century Britain. [2]

There are also some personal accounts of lynching in Budapest, Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the occupying Soviets.

[edit] Mexico

On November 23, 2004, in the Tlahuac lynching, three Mexican undercover federal agents doing a narcotics investigation were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan (Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and mistakenly suspected they were trying to abduct children from a primary school. The policemen identified themselves immediately but were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The whole 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 policemen were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect the lynching was provoked by the persons being investigated.

Both local and federal authorities abandoned them to their fate, saying the town was too far away to even try to arrive in time and some officials stating they would provoke a massacre if they tried to rescue them from the mob.

[edit] Israel, West Bank and Gaza Strip

On April 11, 1974, Arab Palestinian terrorists infiltrating from Lebanon carried out an attack on the Israeli border town of Kiryat Shmona, killed eighteen inhabitants and were eventually killed by security forces. In the aftermath, a mob of townspeople threw the bodies out of the windows of the house where they were killed, and mutilated them in the street. By rumors which were widespread in Israel at the time, but which were never confirmed or impartially investigated, one or more of the Palestinians might have still been alive.

Following the 1992 killing of the Israeli girl Helena Rapp at the Tel-Aviv suburb Bat Yam, mobs shouting "Death to the Arabs!" rampaged for several days in the city streets, assaulting any Arab they could find. A group of West Bank Palestinians employed as construction workers in the town barricaded themselves on an upper floor of a half-built house, besieged by the mob, until finally extracted by large police forces.

Palestinian lynch mobs have murdered Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel ^[4][5][6]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 in the current Intifada (see below) but so far in much fewer numbers.^[7]

Israelis have been lynched as well. On October 12, 2000, soon after the outbreak of the second Intifada, Israeli reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami got lost when they had taken a wrong turn into Palestinian territory in Ramallah. They blundered into the funeral procession of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces on the previous day, were captured by Palestinians and taken to a police station. However, a mob gathered outside the police building and broke in, and the two were beaten to in what was described as a "lynching" by Amnesty International^[8] and the BBC.^[9] During the killings, the pregnant wife of Vadim Norzich called her husband's cell phone, only to be told "your man is dead" by the Palestinian mob. Their bodies were then thrown out of the window into the hands of a mob of Palestinians, who mutilated the bodies beyond recognition.

Some Arabic news agencies reported that the two had been suspected of being members of the "Mista'arvim" ("Arabizers"), an Israeli Army special forces unit whose men are trained to impersonate Arabs, and who at the time several times infiltrated Palestinian cities and carried out the detention or assassination of those designated "wanted terrorists". However, the western media found no reason to consider the two anything but ordinary Israeli reserve soldiers, nor did Palestinian or other Arab media seriously persist in such assertions in later reports. ^[10]

In an incident where an Arab-American tourist skidded his car into a Jerusalem bus stop, killing two Israelis, he was then shot (although it is not clear if this was a lynching or a civilian suspecting him to be a terrorist.)^[11] There was also reports of attempted harm to an Arab bystander after a Palestinian suicide bombing^[12]

Following a Suicide Bombing in the Israeli city of Netanya in April 2003, a mob assaulted random Arabs in the city's market-place area. Bassam Salah, a West Bank worker who had nothing to do with the bombing, was severely beaten, was hospitalised for a month and remained crippled for life. After strong pressures by Israeli peace groups, the government consented to compensate Salah who permanently lost the ability to work.

During the settler efforts to prevent Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in June 2005, a mob of settlers trapped a young Palestinian in the corner of a Palestinian house which they illegally occupied in the Mawasi Village on the Gaza seashore, beat him with heavy stones and severely wounded him. An Israeli army medic, who defended the young Palestinian and possibly saved his life, was himself assaulted and wounded by the mob. ^[13]

[edit] South Africa

The practice of whipping and necklacing offenders and political opponents evolved in the 1980s and 1990s under the apartheid regime in South Africa. Residents of black townships lost confidence in the apartheid judicial system and formed "people's courts" that authorized whip lashings and deaths by necklacing. Necklacing is a term used to describe the torture and execution of victims by igniting a rubber, kerosene-filled, tire that has been forced around the victim's chest and arms. Necklacing was used to punish numerous victims, including children, who were alleged to be traitors to the black liberation movement as well as relatives and associates of the offenders.^[14] The practice was endorsed by Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress.^[15]

[edit] Sources and external links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Lynchings

• Etymology OnLine
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. passim

• Gonzales-Day, Ken, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935. Duke University Press, 2006.
• Markovitz, Jonathan, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
• Before the Needles, Executions (and Lynchings) in America Before Lethal Injection, Details of thousands of lynchings
• Houghton Mifflin: The Reader's Companion to American History - Lynching
• Origin of the word Lynch
• Lynchings in the State of Iowa
• Lynchings in America
• Without Sanctuary website
• Lyrics to "Strange Fruit" a protest song about lynching, written by Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday
• The Lynching of Big Steve Long
• Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law, 1893
• NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. New York City: Arno Press, 1919,

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible. — Maximilien Robespierre, address to the National Convention, 17 pluviôse an II (5 February 1794)
2. ^ Dahleen Glanton, "Controversial exhibit on lynching opens in Atlanta" May 5, 2002, Chicago Tribune. Reproduced online on the site of deltasigmatheta.com, archived on the Internet Archive March 11, 2005.
3. ^ Musarium: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photograhy in America. Accessed 6 November 2006.
4. ^ Yizhar Be'er, Dr. Saleh 'Abdel-Jawad, Collaborators in the Occupied Territories: Human Rights Abuses and Violations (Microsoft Word document), B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, January 1994. Accessed 6 November 2006. Also available as an RTF document, archived 15 July 2004 on the Internet Archive.
5. ^ Justin Huggler and Sa'id Ghazali, "Palestinian collaborators executed", The Independent, 24 October 2003, reproduced on fromoccupiedpalestine.org. Accessed 6 November 2006.
6. ^ Suzanne Goldenberg 'Spies' lynched as Zinni flies in, The Guardian, March 15, 2002. Accessed 6 November 2006.
7. ^ VI. Balancing Security and Human Rights During the Intifada in Justice Undermined: Balancing Security and Human Rights in the Palestinian Justice System, Human Rights Watch Reports, November 2001, Vol. 13, No. 4 (E).
8. ^ Chapter 3: Killings By Palestinians in Broken Lives — A year of intifada, Amnesty International, AI Index: MDE 15/083/2001, 13 November 2001. Accessed 6 November 2006.
9. ^ Martin Asser, Lynch mob's brutal attack, BBC News, 13 October 2000. Accessed 6 November 2006.
10. ^ Khaled Amayreh, Selective Outrage, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 19-25 October 2000, Issue No. 504. Accessed 6 November 2006.
11. ^ Jerusalem bystanders kill driver; Police say he wasn't a terrorist, CNN News, February 26, 1996. Accessed 6 November 2006.
12. ^ Week of March 6, 2001 in Events related to policing, Harper's. Accessed 6 November 2006.
13. ^ Photo appears on the Hebrew news website Y-net, July 7, 2005 [1]
14. ^ 4. Background: The Black Struggle For Political Power: Major Forces in the Conflict, in The Killings in South Africa: The Role of the Security Forces and the Response of the State, Human Rights Watch, January 8, 1991. ISBN 0-929692-76-4. Accessed 6 November 2006.
15. ^ Row over 'mother of the nation' Winnie Mandela, The Guardian, January 27, 1989

• Allen, James (editor), Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Pub: 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1 accompanied by an online photographic survey of the history of lynchings in the United States
• Bancroft, H. H., Popular Tribunals (2 vols., San Francisco, 1887)
• Bernstein, Patricia, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP, Texas A&M University Press (March, 2005), hardcover, ISBN 1-58544-416-2
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1993), ISBN 0-252-06345-7
• Cutler, James E., Lynch Law (New York, 1905)
• Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown : The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House (2002). Hardcover ISBN 0-375-50324-2, softcover ISBN 0-375-75445-8
• Ginzburg, Ralph 100 Years Of Lynchings, Black Classic Press (1962, 1988) softcover, ISBN 0-933121-18-0
• Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (1995), ISBN 0-252-06413-5
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1900 Mob Rule in New Orleans Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics Gutenberg eBook
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1895 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases Gutenberg eBook
• Wood, Joe, Ugly Water, St. Louis: Lulu (2006). Softcover ISBN 978-1-4116-2218-0