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Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often in the form of a hanging) for maximum intimidation. [1] Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in all societies. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
In the United States, where the word for "lynching" likely originated, lynchings of African Americans became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era, especially during the nadir of American race relations. [7]
The origins of the word lynch are obscure, but it likely originated during the American Revolution. The verb comes from the phrase Lynch Law, a term for a punishment without trial. Two Americans during this era are generally credited for coining the phrase: Charles Lynch (1736–1796) and William Lynch (1742–1820), both of whom lived in Virginia in the 1780s. [8] Charles Lynch is more likely to have coined the phrase, as he was known to have used the term in 1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used the term until much later. There is no evidence that death was imposed as a punishment by either of the two men. [9] In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered Lynch's law to Tories "for Dealing with the negroes &c". [10]
Charles Lynch was a Virginia Quaker, [11] : 23ff planter, and Patriot who headed a county court in Virginia which imprisoned Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War, occasionally imprisoning them for up to a year. Although he lacked proper jurisdiction for detaining these persons, he claimed this right by arguing wartime necessity. Lynch was concerned that he might face legal action from one or more of those whom he had imprisoned, notwithstanding that the Patriots had won the war. This action by the Congress provoked controversy,[ citation needed ] and it was in connection with this that the term Lynch law, meaning the assumption of extrajudicial authority, came into common parlance in the United States. Lynch was not accused of racist bias. He acquitted Black people accused of murder on three occasions. [12] [13] He was accused, however, of ethnic prejudice in his handling of Welsh miners. [10]
William Lynch from Virginia claimed that the phrase was first used in a 1780 compact signed by him and his neighbors in Pittsylvania County.
A 17th-century legend of James Lynch fitz Stephen, who was Mayor of Galway in Ireland in 1493, says that when his son was convicted of murder, the mayor hanged him from his own house. [14] The story was proposed by 1904 as the origin of the word "lynch". [15] It is dismissed by etymologists, both because of the distance in time and place from the alleged event to the word's later emergence, and because the incident did not constitute a lynching in the modern sense. [15] [9]
The archaic verb linch, to beat severely with a pliable instrument, to chastise or to maltreat, has been proposed as the etymological source; but there is no evidence that the word has survived into modern times, so this claim is also considered implausible. [11] : 16
Since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, there has been a false etymology claiming that the word lynching comes from a fictitious William Lynch speech that was given by an especially brutal slaveholder to other slaveholders to explain how to control their slaves. Although a real person named William Lynch might have been the origin of the word lynching, the real life William Lynch definitely did not give this speech, and it is unknown whether the real William Lynch even owned slaves at all. [16]
Lynchings took place in many parts of the world over the centuries. [17]
Lynchings took place in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, most commonly in Southern states and Western frontier settlements and most frequently in the late 19th century. They were often performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses. [20] From 1883 to 1941 there were 4,467 victims of lynching. Of these, 4,027 were male, and 99 female. 341 were of unknown sex but are assumed to be likely male. In terms of ethnicity, 3,265 were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese. [21] At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, a Black man named McIntosh who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of over 1,000 people. [22]
Universal suffrage indicated the beginning of mass lynching across southern United States. The rise to mobs of outrage such as the "red shirt" [23] bands began to appear in many southern states at the time of when voting became a right for black men, a key historical turn of events that gave uprise to lynching. Initially intended as scare tactics, this outrage continues to grow more and more violent to the point of men being take from their homes, beaten, exiled, and even assassinated.
Mob violence arose as a means of enforcing White supremacy [24] and it frequently verged on systematic political terrorism. After the American Civil War, secret white supremacist terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, previously known as the "red-shirt bands" instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings due to a perceived loss of white power in America. [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched Black people in order to instill fear. In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred. [30] The magnitude of the extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns, to prevent blacks from voting, reached epidemic proportions. [26] [27] [28] [29] The ideology behind lynching directly connected to the denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly in 1900 by United States Senator Benjamin Tillman, who was previously governor of South Carolina as quoted below:
We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. [31] [32]
Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to their victims. Souvenir taking, such as the taking of pieces of rope, clothing, branches and sometimes body parts was not uncommon. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards. [33] [34]
Instances of
The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced to the United States Congress in 1918 by Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri. The bill was passed by the United States House of Representatives in 1922, and in the same year it was given a favorable report by the United States Senate Committee. Its passage was blocked by White Democratic senators from the Solid South, the only representatives elected since the southern states had disenfranchised African Americans around the start of the 20th century. [35] The Dyer Bill influenced later anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill, which was also defeated in the US Senate. [36]
The song "Strange Fruit" was composed by Abel Meeropol in 1937, inspired by the photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana. Meeropol said that the photograph "haunted me for days". [37] It was published as a poem in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses , in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. The poem was set to music, also by Meeropol, and the song was performed and popularized by Billie Holiday. [38] The song has been performed by many other singers, including Nina Simone.
By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining new momentum. It was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old youth from Chicago who was killed while visiting an uncle in Mississippi. His mother insisted on having an open-casket funeral so that people could see how badly her son had been beaten. The Black community throughout the U.S. became mobilized. [39] Vann R. Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy". [39] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were acquitted by an all-White jury. [40] David Jackson writes that it was the photograph of the "child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism." [41]
Most lynchings ceased by the 1960s, [42] [43] but even in 2021 there were claims that racist lynchings still happen in the United States, being covered up as suicides. [44]
In 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was opened in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial that commemorates the victims of lynchings in the United States.
On March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022 into law, which classified lynching as a federal hate crime. [45] [46]
In Liverpool, a series of race riots broke out in 1919 after the end of the First World War between White and Black sailors, many of whom had been demobilized. After a Black sailor had been stabbed by two White sailors in a pub for refusing to give them a cigarette, his friends attacked them the next day in revenge, wounding a policeman in the process. The police responded by launching raids on lodging houses in primarily Black neighborhoods, with casualties on both sides. A White lynch mob gathered outside the houses during the raids and chased a Black sailor, Charles Wootton, into the Mersey River where he drowned. [47] The Charles Wootton College in Liverpool has been named in his memory. [48]
In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg, a German prisoner of war known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime, was lynched by other German prisoners of war in Cultybraggan Camp, a prisoner-of-war camp in Comrie, Scotland. At the end of the Second World War, five of the perpetrators were hanged at Pentonville Prison – the largest multiple execution in 20th-century Britain. [49] [ better source needed ]
The situation is less clear with regards to reported "lynchings" in Germany. Nazi propaganda sometimes tried to depict state-sponsored violence as spontaneous lynchings. The most notorious instance of this was "Kristallnacht", which the government portrayed as the result of "popular wrath" against Jews, but it was carried out in an organized and planned manner, mainly by SA and SS men. Similarly, the approximately 150 confirmed murders of surviving crew members of crashed Allied aircraft in revenge for what Nazi propaganda called "Anglo-American bombing terror" were chiefly conducted by German officials and members of the police or the Gestapo, although civilians sometimes took part in them. The execution of enemy aircrew without trial in some cases had been ordered by Hitler personally in May 1944. It was publicly announced that enemy pilots would no longer be protected from "public wrath". There were secret orders issued that prohibited policemen and soldiers from interfering in favor of the enemy in conflicts between civilians and Allied forces, or prosecuting civilians who engaged in such acts. [50] [51] In summary:
On March 19, 1988, two plain-clothes British soldiers drove straight towards a Provisional IRA funeral procession near Milltown Cemetery in Andersonstown, Belfast. The men were mistaken for Special Air Service members, surrounded by the crowd, dragged out, beaten, kicked, stabbed and eventually shot dead at a waste ground. [53]
Lynching of members of the Turkish Armed Forces occurred in the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt. [54]
Lynchings have been present since the colonial period. [55] Lynchings are a persistent form of extralegal violence in post-Revolutionary Mexico. [56] [57] [58] A number of them have involved religious motivations. [59] [60] During and following the period of the Cristero War. [57] [61]
On September 14, 1968, five employees from the Autonomous University of Puebla were lynched in the village of San Miguel Canoa, in the state of Puebla, after Enrique Meza Pérez, the local priest, incited the villagers to murder the employees, who he believed were communists. [62] The five victims intended to enjoy their holiday climbing La Malinche, a nearby mountain, but they had to stay in the village due to adverse weather conditions. Two of the employees, and the owner of the house where they were staying for the night, were killed; the three survivors sustained serious injuries, including finger amputations. [63] The alleged main instigators were not prosecuted. The few arrested were released after no evidence was found against them. [64]
On November 23, 2004, in the Tláhuac lynching, [65] three Mexican undercover federal agents investigating a narcotics-related crime were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan (Mexico City) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and suspected that they were trying to abduct children from a primary school. The agents immediately identified themselves, but they were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The 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 agents were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect that the lynching was provoked by the persons who were being investigated. Both local and federal authorities had abandoned the agents, saying that the town was too far away for them to try to intervene. Some officials said they would provoke a massacre if the authorities tried to rescue the men from the mob.
According to The Wall Street Journal, "Over the past 60 years, as many as 1.5 million Brazilians have taken part in lynchings...In Brazil, mobs now kill—or try to kill—more than one suspected lawbreaker a day, according to University of São Paulo sociologist José de Souza Martins, Brazil's leading expert on lynchings." [66]
Extrajudicial punishment, including lynching, of alleged criminals who committed various crimes, ranging from theft to murder, has some endorsement in Dominican society. According to a 2014 Latinobarómetro survey, the Dominican Republic had the highest rate of acceptance in Latin America of such unlawful measures. [67] These issues are particularly evident in the Northern Region. [68]
After the 2010 earthquake the slow distribution of relief supplies and the large number of affected people created concerns about civil unrest, marked by looting and mob justice against suspected looters. [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] In a 2010 news story, CNN reported, "At least 45 people, most of them Vodou priests, have been lynched in Haiti since the beginning of the cholera epidemic by angry mobs blaming them for the spread of the disease, officials said. [74]
The practice of whipping and necklacing offenders and political opponents evolved in the 1980s during the apartheid era in South Africa. Residents of Black townships formed "people's courts" and used whip lashings and deaths by necklacing in order to terrorize fellow Blacks who were seen as collaborators with the government. Necklacing is the torture and execution of a victim by igniting a kerosene-filled rubber tire that has been forced around the victim's chest and arms. Necklacing was used to punish victims who were alleged to be traitors to the Black liberation movement along with their relatives and associates. Sometimes the "people's courts" made mistakes, or they used the system to punish those whom the anti-Apartheid movement's leaders opposed. [75] A tremendous controversy arose when the practice was endorsed by Winnie Mandela, then the wife of the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress. [76]
More recently,[ when? ] drug dealers and other gang members have been lynched by People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante organization.[ citation needed ]
The practice of extrajudicial punishments, including lynching, is referred to as 'jungle justice' in Nigeria. [77] The practice is widespread and "an established part of Nigerian society", predating the existence of the police. [77] Exacted punishments vary between a "muddy treatment", that is, being made to roll in the mud for hours [78] and severe beatings followed by necklacing. [79] The case of the Aluu four sparked national outrage. The absence of a functioning judicial system and law enforcement, coupled with corruption are blamed for the continuing existence of the practice. [80] [81]
There are frequent lynchings in Kenya, often as a mob executes a person they feel is guilty. [82] McKee (2024) is written largely with reference to a Kenya Lynchings Database that includes reports of over 3,100 lynched persons for Kenya for the years ca. 1980–2024. [83] That number, however, is just a fraction of the total for that period, which may well exceed 10,000. [84]
Palestinian lynch mobs have murdered Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. [85] [86] [87] 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 into the current intifada ... but at much fewer numbers. [88]
On October 12, 2000, the Ramallah lynching took place. This happened at the el-Bireh police station, where a Palestinian crowd killed and mutilated the bodies of two Israel Defense Forces reservists, Vadim Norzhich (Nurzhitz) and Yosef "Yossi" Avrahami, [a] who had accidentally [89] entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank and were taken into custody by Palestinian Authority policemen. The Israeli reservists were beaten and stabbed. At this point, a Palestinian (later identified as Aziz Salha), appeared at the window, displaying his blood-soaked hands to the crowd, which erupted into cheers. The crowd clapped and cheered as one of the soldier's bodies was then thrown out the window and stamped and beaten by the frenzied crowd. One of the two was shot, set on fire, and his head beaten to a pulp. [90] Soon after, the crowd dragged the two mutilated bodies to Al-Manara Square in the city center and began an impromptu victory celebration. [91] [92] [93] [94] Police officers proceeded to try and confiscate footage from reporters. [91]
On October 18, 2015, an Eritrean asylum seeker, Haftom Zarhum, was lynched by a mob of vengeful Israeli soldiers in Be'er Sheva's central bus station. Israeli security forces misidentified Haftom as the person who shot an Israeli police bus and shot him. Moments after, other security forces joined shooting Haftom when he was bleeding on the ground. Then, a soldier hit him with a bench nearby when two other soldiers approached the victim then forcefully kicked his head and upper body. Another soldier threw a bench over him to prevent his movement. At that moment a bystander pushed the bench away, but the security forces put back the chair and kicked the victim again and pushed the stopper away. Israeli medical forces did not evacuate the victim until eighteen minutes after the first shooting although the victim received 8 shots. [95] In January 2016 four security forces were charged in connection with the lynching. [96] The Israeli civilian who was involved in lynching the Eritrean civilian was sentenced to 100 days community service and 2,000 shekels. [97]
In August 2012, seven Israeli youths were arrested in Jerusalem for what several witnesses described as an attempted lynching of several Palestinian teenagers. The Palestinians received medical treatment and judicial support from Israeli facilities. [98]
In India, lynchings may reflect internal tensions between ethnic communities. Communities sometimes lynch individuals who are accused or suspected of committing crimes. Sociologists and social scientists reject attributing racial discrimination to the caste system and attributed such events to intra-racial ethno-cultural conflicts. [99] [100]
There have been numerous lynchings in relation to cow vigilante violence in India since 2014, [101] mainly involving Hindu mobs lynching Indian Muslims [102] [103] . [104] [105] Some notable examples of such attacks include the 2015 Dadri mob lynching, [106] the 2016 Jharkhand mob lynching, [107] [108] [109] 2017 Alwar mob lynching. [110] [111] and the 2019 Jharkhand mob lynching. Mob lynching was reported for the third time in Alwar in July 2018, when a group of cow vigilantes killed a 31-year-old Muslim man named Rakbar Khan. [112]
In 2006, four members of a Dalit family were slaughtered by Kunbi caste members in khairlanji, a village in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra. [113]
In the 2015 Dimapur mob lynching, a mob in Dimapur, Nagaland, broke into a jail and lynched an accused rapist on March 5, 2015, while he was awaiting trial. [114]
Since May 2017, when seven people were lynched in Jharkhand, India has experienced another spate of mob-related violence and killings known as the Indian WhatsApp lynchings following the spread of fake news, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the WhatsApp message service. [115]
In 2018 Junior civil aviation minister of India had garlanded and honored eight men who had been convicted in the lynching of trader Alimuddin Ansari in Ramgarh in June 2017 in a case of alleged cow vigilantism. [116]
In June 2019, the Jharkhand mob lynching triggered widespread protests. The victim was a Muslim man named Tabrez Ansari and was forced to chant Hindu slogans, including " Jai Shri Ram ". [117] [118]
In July 2019, three men were beaten to death and lynched by mobs in Chhapra district of Bihar, on a minor case of theft of cattle. [119]
Also in 2019, villagers in Jharkhand lynched four people on witchcraft suspicion, after panchayat decided that they were practicing black magic. [120]
in September 2024, in Hayarna, Five men were members of a cow vigilante group that murdered 24-year-old Sabir Malik from West Bengal. [121] [122]
On March 19, 2015, in Kabul, Afghanistan a large crowd beat a young woman, Farkhunda, after she was accused by a local mullah of burning a copy of the Quran, Islam's holy book. Shortly afterwards, a crowd attacked her and beat her to death. They set the young woman's body on fire on the shore of the Kabul River. Although it was unclear whether the woman had burned the Quran, police officials and the clerics in the city defended the lynching, saying that the crowd had a right to defend their faith at all costs. They warned the government against taking action against those who had participated in the lynching. [123] The event was filmed and shared on social media. [124] The day after the incident six men were arrested on accusations of lynching, and Afghanistan's government promised to continue the investigation. [125] On March 22, 2015, Farkhunda's burial was attended by a large crowd of Kabul residents; many demanded that she receive justice. A group of Afghan women carried her coffin, chanted slogans and demanded justice. [126]
A series of high-profile lynchings took place in Papua New Guinea in the late 1970s, in the period following independence. In September 1978, Morris Modeda, a 30-year-old man on trial for dangerous driving causing death, was lynched by a mob of 100 people near the town of Bereina. The lynching took place in front of William Prentice, the Chief Justice of Papua New Guinea, who had adjourned the trial to allow the court to view the site of the accident. Modeda was "battered to death with stones, sticks and a bushknife", while Prentice, his wife, and the court party – including barristers, court officials, witnesses and policemen – were "roughly handled but were not injured". [127] Another prisoner was lynched in the same month in Kainantu while being escorted from a courthouse, receiving axe wounds in the head and chest. [128] Days later, the police station at Banz in the Western Highlands was raided by a mob which freed 50 prisoners and bludgeoned to death a man who had been involved in a fatal car accident. [129]
In 1979, Prentice and his fellow Supreme Court judges delivered the Special Report on the Developing State of Lawlessness to the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea. The report called on "urgent action to end police and prison staff inefficiency, ignorance and lack of discipline" and called for further support from traditional leaders. [130]
Lynching was a form of racial terrorism that has contributed to a legacy of racial inequality that the United States must address. Thousands of people of African descent were killed in violent public acts of racial control and domination and the perpetrators were never held accountable.
Public spectacle lynchings were those in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. Many were carnival-like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim's body parts collected as souvenirs.
Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.
Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.
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ignored (help)I got out of the car to see what was happening and saw that they were dragging something behind them. Within moments they were in front of me and, to my horror, I saw that it was a body, a man they were dragging by the feet. The lower part of his body was on fire and the upper part had been shot at, and the head beaten so badly that it was a pulp, like red jelly.
treating caste as a form of racism is politically mischievous and worse, scientifically nonsense since there is no discernible difference in the racial characteristics between Brahmins and Scheduled Castes
The perception of the caste system as a static and textual stratification has given way to the perception of the caste system as a more processual, empirical and contextual stratification.
Last month Prime Minister Narendra Modi said murder in the name of cow protection is "not acceptable." ... The recent spate of lynchings in India have disturbed many. Muslim men have been murdered by Hindu mobs, ... for allegedly storing beef.
In the broader context of racism in the United States, mass racial violence in the United States consists of ethnic conflicts and race riots, along with such events as:
Vigilantism is the act of preventing, investigating, and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s, slowed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued until 1981. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith were African-American boys who were murdered in a spectacle lynching by a group of thousands on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. They were taken from jail cells, beaten, and hanged from a tree in the county courthouse square. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African-American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob; an unknown woman and a local sports hero intervened, and he was returned to jail. Cameron later stated that Shipp and Smith had committed the murder but that he had run away before that event.
Jesse Washington was a seventeen-year-old African American farmhand who was lynched in the county seat of Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916, in what became a well-known example of lynching. Washington was convicted of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in rural Robinson, Texas. He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. He was then paraded through the street, all while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco's city hall.
Anti-Mexican sentiment is prejudice, fear, discrimination, or hatred towards Mexico, people of Mexican descent, and their culture. It is most commonly found in the United States.
White caps were groups involved in the whitecapping movement who were operating in southern Indiana in the late 19th century. They engaged in vigilante justice and lynchings, with modern viewpoints describing their actions as domestic terrorism. They became common in the state following the American Civil War and lasted until the turn of the 20th century. White caps were especially active in Crawford and neighboring counties in the late 1880s. Several members of the Reno Gang were lynched in 1868, causing an international incident. Some of the members had been extradited to the United States from Canada and were supposed to be under federal protection. Lynchings continued against other criminals, but when two possibly innocent men were killed in Corydon in 1889, Indiana responded by cracking down on the white cap vigilante groups, beginning in the administration of Isaac P. Gray.
Rates of crime in Guatemala are very high. An average of 101 murders per week were reported in 2018. The countries with the highest crime and violence rates in Central America are El Salvador and Honduras. In the 1990s Guatemala had four cities feature in Latin America's top ten cities by murder rate: Escuintla, Izabal (127), Santa Rosa Cuilapa (111) and Guatemala City (101). According to New Yorker magazine, in 2009, "fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala," and 97% of homicides "remain unsolved." Much of the violent nature of Guatemalan society stems back to a 36-year-long civil war However, not only has violence maintained its presence in the post-war context of the country following the Guatemalan Civil War, but it has extended to broader social and economic forms of violence.
On Tuesday, November 12, 1914, John Evans, a black man, was lynched in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States, by a mob of 1,500 white men, women and children. Evans was accused of the murder of Edward Sherman, a white real estate developer, and the attack of Sherman's wife, Mary. After word of the attack spread, and Mary Sherman claimed her attackers were "two negroes," a citywide search ensued. Suspicions immediately led to John Evans. Two days after the murder, a posse consisting of some of the city's most prominent and well-respected members stormed the St. Petersburg jail, threw a noose around Evans' neck and marched him to his death. He was never given a fair trial. Evans was hanged from a light post on the corner of Ninth Street South and Second Avenue. At first, he kept himself alive by wrapping his legs around the light pole. An unidentified white woman in a nearby automobile ended his struggle with a single bullet. Though the shot was fatal, the rest of the crowd began shooting at Evans' dangling body until their ammunition was depleted.
2016 Jharkhand mob lynching refers to the case of lynching of three Muslim cattle traders by allegedly cattle-protecting vigilantes in Balumath forests of Latehar district in the Indian state of Jharkhand on 18 March 2016. The attackers killed 32 year old Mazlum Ansari and 12 year old Imtiaz Khan who were both found hanging from a tree.
Fourteen-year-old girl Bedelyn Esther Orozco Gómez was burned to death in Río Bravo, Suchitepéquez, Guatemala, in May 2015 by a vigilante mob after being accused by some of involvement in the killing of a moto taxi driver. A video of the lynching was later uploaded to YouTube and widely circulated on Guatemalan social media.
The Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal is a Hindutva group and right-wing federation of cattle protection movements in India affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and a member of the Sangh Parivar. It provides guidance and support in the construction of protective shelters for cattle and is supporting cattle protection movements all over India, and often engages in vigilante violence against minorities, primarily Muslims and Dalits. This organization is not affiliated with any political party and its members are all volunteers. It was founded in 2012 by Pawan Pandit.
Austin Callaway, also known as Austin Brown, was a young African-American man who was taken from jail by a group of six white men and lynched on September 8, 1940, in LaGrange, Georgia. The day before, Callaway had been arrested as a suspect in an assault of a white woman. The gang carried out extrajudicial punishment and prevented the youth from ever receiving a trial. They shot him numerous times, fatally wounding him and leaving him for dead. Found by a motorist, Callaway was taken to a hospital, where he died of his wounds.
The 2017 Alwar mob lynching was the attack and murder of Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer from Nuh district of Haryana, allegedly by a group of 200 cow vigilantes affiliated with right-wing Hindutva groups in Behror in Alwar, Rajasthan, India on 1 April, 2017. Six others who were with Pehlu Khan were also beaten by the cow vigilantes.
Cow vigilante violence is a pattern of mob-based collective vigilante violence seen in India. The attacks are perpetuated by Hindu nationalists against non-Hindus to protect cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism.
A lynching postcard is a postcard bearing the photograph of a lynching—a vigilante murder usually motivated by racial hatred—intended to be distributed, collected, or kept as a souvenir. Often a lynching postcard would be inscribed with racist text or poems. Lynching postcards were in widespread production for more than fifty years in the United States, although their distribution through the United States Postal Service was banned in 1908.
La Matanza and the Hora de Sangre was a period of anti-Mexican violence in Texas, including massacres and lynchings, between 1910 and 1920 in the midst of tensions between the United States and Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. This violence was committed by Anglo-Texan vigilantes, and law enforcement, such as the Texas Rangers, during operations against bandit raids known as the Bandit Wars. The violence and denial of civil liberties during this period was justified by racism. Ranger violence reached its peak from 1915 to 1919, in response to increasing conflict, initially because of the Plan de San Diego, by Mexican and Tejano insurgents to take Texas. This period was referred to as the Hora de Sangre by Mexicans in South Texas, many of whom fled to Mexico to escape the violence. Estimates for the number of Mexican Americans killed in the violence in Texas during the 1910s, ranges from 300 to 5,000 killed. At least 100 Mexican Americans were lynched in the 1910s, many in Texas. Many murders were concealed and went unreported, with some in South Texas, suspected by Rangers of supporting rebels, being placed on blacklists and often "disappearing".
A Hindu Terrorism - Masjid k Samny - Anti Muslim Salogans, Tod Phod by a Group of RSS Trained Hindu Goons۔