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The term "lynching" is believed to derive from the name of Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter who presided over an irregular and unofficial court during the Revolutionary War. Lynch's use of extralegal measures to punish those loyal to the British crown, helped to inspire mobs in later years to administer their own form of vigilante justice outside of the courts. Eventually, the term came to describe cases where supposed offenders were executed through mob violence without a proper trial and outside of legal jurisdiction. The most famous examples of these executions in the U.S. were those where the victim was hanged (due to the relatively large amount of photographic evidence); however, there were also cases where the victims were shot, burned or tortured and dismembered, among others. 

Lynching before Jim Crow

In the early years of U.S. independence, lynching was most common along the frontier and in western territories, due to the lack of established or immediate judicial systems, and most studies suggest that these victims were mostly white and Mexican. Possibly the largest case of lynching (and largest case of mass hanging) in the United States, was in Texas in 1862, in what is known as the "Great Hanging at Gainsville"; this was where local slaveholders organized the mob hanging of 41 white men and shot three others, due to their supposed allegiance to the Union. Following the American Civil War, however, lynching became inextricably linked with racial inequality and white supremacy in the southern states of the U.S., and black Americans comprised the vast majority of lynching victims from 1886 onwards.

Lynching of black Americans

The Compromise of 1877 coincided with the emergence of the Jim Crow era in the southern states; it saw the removal of Union troops from the south and established political structures based on white supremacy and the oppression of minorities. Gradually, many of the rights and protections that were granted to black Americans following emancipation were stripped away. This period also saw a vast increase in the number of lynchings in the country, with the majority of these cases taking place in the south. Within ten years of Reconstruction's end, the number of black lynchings exceeded those of white lynchings, and over the next century it is estimated that there were over 4,700 lynchings across the country. Of the 4,740 lynchings estimated to have taken place between 1882 and 1965, 3,445 of the victims were black; this equates to over 72 percent of the total victims of lynching, despite black Americans making up just 10 to 13 percent of the total population. Of these 4,700 lynchings, around 3,500 took place in former Confederate states, where the share of black victims increased to 86 percent. As the years progressed, organized lynchings became more infrequent and were publicized less, and the implementation of the death penalty is thought to have replaced the sense of justice that lynching brought to its perpetrators. Nonetheless, it was not until 1952 where the U.S. went a full year without any known cases of lynching, and the final lynching cases were recorded in 1964 (although some have classified a number of murders after 1964 as lynchings, due to their connections with race and civil rights).