Knowra Lynching in the United States Lynching in the United States Lynching in the United States was extrajudicial killing by mobs, used especially to enforce racial hierarchy and terrorize Black communities. It flourished amid weak legal protection and organized white supremacy.
Racial terror : Violence intended to intimidate and control a population on the basis of race. Lynching terrorized Black communities beyond the people directly targeted.
Reconstruction era : The period of political rebuilding and constitutional change in the United States after the Civil War, lasting from 1865 to 1877. Lynching expanded amid struggles over emancipation and Black political power.
Ida B. Wells : An African American journalist and activist who investigated lynching and campaigned against it. Her investigations challenged claims used to excuse mob killings.
Capital punishment : The legally authorized execution of a person convicted of a crime. Lynching bypassed trial and legal authority, unlike a state execution.
NAACP : A United States civil rights organization founded in 1909 to secure political, educational, social, and economic equality. The organization investigated lynching and lobbied for federal anti-lynching legislation.
White supremacy : A system of beliefs and practices that maintains political, social, or economic dominance for white people. Lynch mobs enforced racial hierarchy outside and alongside formal law.
Redemption (United States history) : The late-nineteenth-century restoration of white Democratic rule in the former Confederacy. Redemption politics accompanied renewed racial violence and the defeat of Reconstruction.
Mary Church Terrell : An African American educator and civil rights activist who helped found the National Association of Colored Women. She organized against lynching through Black women's clubs and public advocacy.
Emmett Till : A 14-year-old Black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955; his open-casket funeral galvanized civil rights activism. His murder is often discussed alongside lynching and its legacy, though it was not a typical mob spectacle.
Tulsa race massacre : The 1921 destruction of much of the Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by a white mob. It shows how racial mob violence extended beyond individual lynchings to whole communities.
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