Lynching in the United States

In September 1850, California became the 31st state of the United States.

Many of the Mexicans who were native to what would become a state within the United States were experienced miners, and they had great success mining gold in California.[23] Their success aroused animosity by white prospectors, who intimidated Mexican miners with the threat of violence and committed violence against some. Between 1848 and 1860, white Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California.[23] On July 5, 1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia.[24] She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home.[25]

The San Francisco Vigilance Movement has traditionally been portrayed as a positive response to government corruption and rampant crime, but revisionist historians have argued that it created more lawlessness than it eliminated.[26] Four men were executed by the 1851 Committee of Vigilance before it disbanded. When the second Committee of Vigilance was instituted in 1856, in response to the murder of publisher James King of William, it hanged a total of four men, all accused of murder.[27]

During the same year of 1851, just after the beginning of the Gold Rush, these Committees lynched an unnamed thief in northern California. The Gold Rush and the economic prosperity of Mexican-born people was one of the main reasons for mob violence against them. Other factors include land and livestock, since they were also a form of economic success. In conjunction with lynching, mobs also attempted to expel Mexicans, and other groups such as the indigenous peoples of the region, from areas with great mining activity and gold. As a result of the violence against Mexicans, many formed bands of bandits and would raid towns. One case, in 1855, was when a group of bandits went into Rancheria and killed six people. When the news of this incident spread, a mob of 1,500 people formed, rounded up 38 Mexicans, and executed Puertanino. The mob also expelled all the Mexicans in Rancheria and nearby towns as well, burning their homes.[28]

On October 24, 1871, a mob rampaged through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles and killed at least 18 Chinese Americans, after a white businessman had inadvertently been killed there in the crossfire of a tong battle within the Chinese community.

After the body of Brooke Hart was found on November 26, 1933, Thomas Harold Thurman and John Holmes, who had confessed to kidnapping and murdering Hart, were lynched on November 26 or November 27, 1933.[29][30]

"Lynching in Texas", a project of Sam Houston State University, maintains a database of over 600 lynchings committed in Texas between 1882 and 1942.[31] Many of the lynchings were of people of Mexican heritage.

During the early 1900s, hostilities between Anglos and Mexicans along the "Brown Belt" were common. In Rocksprings, Antonio Rodriguez, a Mexican, was burned at the stake for allegedly killing a white woman, Effie Greer Anderson. This event was widely publicized and protests against the treatment of Mexicans in the U.S. erupted within the interior of Mexico, namely in Guadalajara and Mexico City.[32]

Members of the Texas Rangers were charged in 1918 with the murder of Florencio Garcia. Two rangers had taken Garcia into custody for a theft investigation. The next day they let Garcia go, and were last seen escorting him on a mule. Garcia was never seen again. A month after the interrogation, bones and Garcia's clothing were found beside the road where the Rangers claimed to have let Garcia go. The Rangers were arrested for murder, freed on bail, and acquitted due to lack of evidence. The case became part of the Canales investigation into criminal conduct by the Rangers.[33]^:80

In 1859, white settlers began to expel Mexicans from Arizona. The mob was able to chase Mexicans out of many towns, southward. Even though they were successful in doing so, the mob followed and killed many of the people that had been chased out. The Sonoita massacre was a result of these expulsions, where white settlers killed four Mexicans and one Native American.

In 1915, the lynching of the Leon brothers by deputies Fenter and Moore were no different than past or future lynching violence. However, the aftermath of this event was unusual. The perpetrators were arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders. Including the fact that these deaths were recorded, since, before 1915, there were no records of lynching. The conviction of the Rangers resulted in more mob violence where an estimated 500 Mexicans were killed. This was known as La Hora de Sangre or the Hour of Blood. No perpetrators were convicted for these deaths, which continued up until 1920.[34]

Another well-documented episode in the history of the American West is the Johnson County War, a dispute in the 1890s over land use in Wyoming. Large-scale ranchers hired mercenaries to lynch the small ranchers.

Alonzo Tucker was a traveling boxer who happened to be heading north from California to Washington. Part of his travels led him to stay in Coos Bay, Oregon where he was lynched by a mob on September 18, 1902. He was accused by Mrs. Dennis for assault. After the lynching, Mrs. Dennis and her family quickly left town and headed to California. Alonzo Tucker is the only documented lynching of a black man in Oregon.[35]

Other lynchings include many Native Americans.[36]

The late 1800s and early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta showed both frontier influence and actions directed at repressing African Americans. After the Civil War, 90% of the Delta was still undeveloped.[10] Both whites and blacks migrated there for a chance to buy land in the backcountry. It was frontier wilderness, heavily forested and without roads for years.[10] Before the start of the 20th century, lynchings often took the form of frontier justice directed at transient workers as well as residents.[10] Thousands of workers were brought in by planters to do lumbering and work on levees.

French newspaper Le Petit Journal covering lynchings in the U.S. with the headline "racial massacre of negroes". At least 25 blacks were killed during the 1906 Atlanta race riot with some blacks hung from lamp posts.[45]

Whites accounted for just over 12 percent of the Delta region's population, but made up nearly 17 percent of lynching victims. So, in this region, they were lynched at a rate that was over 35 percent higher than their proportion in the population, primarily due to being accused of crimes against property (chiefly theft). Conversely, blacks were lynched at a rate, in the Delta, lesser than their proportion of the population. However, this was unlike the rest of the South, where blacks comprised the majority of lynching victims. In the Delta, they were most often accused of murder or attempted murder, in half the cases, and 15 percent of the time, they were accused of rape, meaning that another 15 percent of the time they were accused of a combination of rape and murder, or rape and attempted murder.[10]

Body of a lynched black male, propped up in a rocking chair for a photograph, circa 1900. Paint has been applied to his face, circular disks glued to his cheeks, cotton glued to his face and head, while a rod props up the victim's head.

A clear seasonal pattern to lynchings existed with colder months being the deadliest. As noted, cotton prices fell during the 1880s and 1890s, increasing economic pressures. "From September through December, the cotton was picked, debts were revealed, and profits (or losses) realized... Whether concluding old contracts or discussing new arrangements, [landlords and tenants] frequently came into conflict in these months and sometimes fell to blows."[10] During the winter, murder was most cited as a cause for lynching. After 1901, as economics shifted and more blacks became renters and sharecroppers in the Delta, with few exceptions, only African Americans were lynched. The frequency increased from 1901 to 1908 after African Americans were disfranchised. "In the twentieth century Delta vigilantism finally became predictably joined to white supremacy."[46]

Conclusions of numerous studies since the mid-20th century have found the following variables affecting the rate of lynchings in the South: "lynchings were more numerous where the African American population was relatively large, the agricultural economy was based predominantly on cotton, the white population was economically stressed, the Democratic Party was stronger, and multiple religious organizations competed for congregants."[47]

The hanging of Josefa Segovia (Juanita) in Downieville

According to the Tuskegee Institute, of the 4,743 people lynched between 1882 and 1968, 1,297 were listed as "white". The Tuskegee Institute, which kept the most complete records, documented victims internally as "Negro", "white", "Chinese", and occasionally as "Mexican" or "Indian", but merged these into only two categories of black or white in the tallies it published. Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims were tallied as white. Particularly in the West, minorities such as Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and others were also lynching victims. The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest was long overlooked in American history, when attention was focused on the treatment of African Americans in the South.[48][49][23]

In modern scholarship, researchers estimate that 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928. Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic was second only to that of the African-American community, which endured an average of 37.1 per 100,000 of population during that period. Between 1848 and 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population.[23]

After their increased immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century, Italian Americans in the South were recruited for laboring jobs. On March 14, 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans, Louisiana, for their alleged role in the murder of David Hennessy, an ethnic Irish New Orleans police chief.[50] This incident was one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.[51] A total of twenty Italians were lynched during the 1890s. Although most lynchings of Italian Americans occurred in the South, Italians did not comprise a major portion of immigrants or a major portion of the population as a whole. Isolated lynchings of Italians also occurred in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.

On February 21, 1909, a riot targeting Greek Americans occurred in Omaha, Nebraska. Many Greeks were looted, beaten and businesses were burnt.

Between the 1830s and 1850s the majority of those lynched were whites. More whites were lynched than blacks for the years 1882–1885. By 1890s, the number of blacks lynched yearly grew to a number significantly more than that of whites and vast majority of victims were black from then on. White people were mostly lynched in the Western states and territories, although there were over 200 cases in the South. According to the Tuskegee Institute, in 1884 near Georgetown, Colorado, there was one instance of 17 "unknown white men" being hanged as cattle thieves in a single day. In the West, lynchings were often done to establish law and order.[52][11][53]

From left to right, the lynching of killer-for-hire Jim Miller and three others in Ada, Oklahoma, on April 19, 1909

The mob-style lynching of African-American Will James in Cairo, Illinois, on November 11, 1909. A crowd of thousands watched the lynching.[54]

The lynching of Laura Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911[55][56]

Lynching of Bennie Simmons, soaked in coal oil before being set on fire. June 13, 1913, Oklahoma

After 1876, the frequency of lynching decreased somewhat until the later 19th century. White Democrats had regained political control of the state legislatures. Lynching was extrajudicial punishment, used by the society to terrorize freedmen and whites alike. Southern Republicans in Congress sought to protect black voting rights by using Federal troops for enforcement. But a congressional deal to elect Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876 (in spite of his losing the popular vote to New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden) included a pledge to remove Federal troops from the South. The Redeemers, many of whom had been members of such paramilitary groups as the White Cappers, the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, and the Red Shirts, which supported white Democrats, had used terrorist violence and assassinations in order to suppress black and Republican voting and regain control of the state legislatures.

Lynchings were public demonstrations of white power and a means to exert social control. Racial tensions had an economic base. In attempting to reconstruct the plantation economy, planters were anxious to control labor. In addition, agricultural depression was widespread, and the price of cotton kept falling after the Civil War into the 1890s. A labor shortage occurred in many parts of the Deep South, most especially in the Mississippi Delta, which was being rapidly developed for agriculture. Southern attempts to recruit immigrant labor were unsuccessful, as immigrants would quickly leave field labor. Lynchings erupted when farmers tried to terrorize the laborers, especially when time came to settle and they were unable to pay wages, but tried to keep laborers from leaving.

More than 85 percent of the estimated 5,000 lynchings in the post–Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. With economic strains across the Deep South and a low price for cotton, 1892 was a peak year when 161 African Americans were lynched. The passage of Jim Crow laws, beginning in the 1890s completed the revival of white supremacy in the South. Terror and lynching were believed to be used to enforce both these formal laws and a variety of unwritten rules of conduct meant to assert white domination. In most years from 1889 to 1923, 50 to 100 lynchings occurred annually across the South. They were at a peak in the last decade of the 19th century, but remained high for years.

The frequency of lynchings rose during years of poor economy and low prices for cotton, demonstrating that more than social tensions generated the catalysts for mob action against the underclass.[5] Researchers have studied various models to determine what motivated lynchings. One study of lynching rates of blacks in Southern counties between 1889 and 1931 found a relation to the concentration of blacks in parts of the Deep South: where the black population was concentrated, lynching rates were higher. Such areas also had a particular mix of socioeconomic conditions, with a high dependence on cotton cultivation.[57]

The stated ideology of whites about lynching was directly connected with denial of political and social equality, and sexual fears of white men; it was expressed by Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor and U.S. Senator, speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1900:

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.[58]

The 1893 public lynching of black teenager Henry Smith in Paris, Texas

Henry Smith, an alcoholic African-American handyman accused of murdering a policeman's daughter, was a noted lynching victim because of the ferocity of the attack against him and the huge crowd that gathered.[59] He was lynched at Paris, Texas, in 1893 for killing Myrtle Vance, the three-year-old daughter of a Texas policeman, after the policeman had assaulted Smith.[60] Smith was not tried in a court of law. A large crowd followed the lynching, as was common then in the style of public executions. Henry Smith was fastened to a wooden platform, tortured for 50 minutes by red-hot iron brands, and burned alive while more than 10,000 spectators cheered.[59]

Fewer than one percent of lynch mob participants were ever convicted by local courts and they were seldom prosecuted or brought to trial. By the late 19th century, trial juries in most of the southern United States were all white because African Americans had been disenfranchised, and only registered voters could serve as jurors. Often juries never let the matter go past the inquest.

Such cases happened in the North as well. In 1892, a police officer in Port Jervis, New York, tried to stop the lynching of a black man who had been wrongfully accused of assaulting a white woman. The mob responded by putting the noose around the officer's neck as a way of scaring him, and completed killing the other man. Although at the inquest the officer identified eight people who had participated in the lynching, including the former chief of police, the jury determined that the murder had been carried out "by person or persons unknown".[61]

A postcard showing the 1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings. Two of the black victims are still hanging while the third is on the ground.

In Duluth, Minnesota, on June 15, 1920, three young African-American traveling circus workers were lynched after having been accused of having raped a white woman and were jailed pending a grand jury hearing. A physician's subsequent examination of the woman found no evidence of rape or assault. The alleged motive and action by a mob were consistent with the "community policing" model.[62]

Although the rhetoric surrounding lynchings frequently suggested they were to protect the virtue and safety of white women, the actions basically arose out of white attempts to maintain domination in a rapidly changing society and their fears of social change.[53] Victims were the scapegoats for peoples' attempts to control agriculture, labor, and education, as well as a reaction to economic stresses during downturns when cotton prices dropped, and larger disasters such as the boll weevil.

According to a Time magazine article, April 2, 2000:

There were lynchings in the Midwestern and Western states, mostly of Asians, Mexicans, and Native Americans. But it was in the South that lynching evolved into a semiofficial institution of racial terror against blacks. All across the former Confederacy, blacks who were suspected of crimes against whites—or even "offenses" no greater than failing to step aside for a white man's car or protesting a lynching—were tortured, hanged and burned to death by the thousands. In a prefatory essay in Without Sanctuary, historian Leon F. Litwack writes that between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,742 African Americans were murdered that way.

In 1903, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a new, popular children's game: "The Game of Lynching". "Imaginary mayor gives order not to harm imaginary mob, and an imaginary hanging follows. Fire contributes realistic touch." "It has crowded out baseball", and if it continues, "may deprive of some of its prestige the game of football."[63]

African Americans emerged from the Civil War with the political experience and stature to resist attacks, but disfranchisement and imposition of Jim Crow in the South at the turn of the 20th century closed them out of the political system and judicial system in many ways. Advocacy organizations compiled statistics and publicized the atrocities, as well as working for enforcement of civil rights and a federal anti-lynching law. From the early 1880s, the Chicago Tribune reprinted accounts of lynchings from other newspapers, and published annual statistics. These provided the main source for the compilations by the Tuskegee Institute to document lynchings, a practice it continued until 1968.[74]

Ida B. Wells exposed lynching in the early 1890s to an international audience

In 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was shocked when three friends in Memphis, Tennessee, were lynched. She learned it was because their grocery store had competed successfully against a white-owned store. Outraged, Wells-Barnett began a global anti-lynching campaign that raised awareness of these murders. She also investigated lynchings and overturned the common idea that they were based on black sexual crimes, as was popularly discussed; she found lynchings were more an effort to suppress blacks who competed economically with whites, especially if they were successful. As a result of her efforts at education, black women in the U.S. became active in the anti-lynching crusade, often in the form of clubs that raised money to publicize the abuses. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909, Wells became part of its multi-racial leadership and continued to be active against lynching. The NAACP began to publish lynching statistics at their office in New York City.

In 1898 Alexander Manly of Wilmington, North Carolina, directly challenged popular ideas about lynching in an editorial in his newspaper The Daily Record. He noted that consensual relationships took place between white women and black men, and said that many of the latter had white fathers (as he did). His references to miscegenation lifted the veil of denial. Whites were outraged. A mob destroyed his printing press and business, ran black leaders out of town and killed many others, and overturned the biracial Populist-Republican city government, headed by a white mayor and majority-white council. Manly escaped, eventually settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1903, writer Charles W. Chesnutt of Ohio published the article "The Disfranchisement of the Negro", detailing civil rights abuses as Southern states passed laws and constitutions that essentially disenfranchised African Americans, excluding them wholesale from the political system. He publicized the need for change in the South. Numerous writers appealed to the literate public.[75]

NAACP Flag against Lynching

In 1904, Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, published an article in the magazine North American Review to respond to Southerner Thomas Nelson Page. She analyzed and refuted with data his attempted justification of lynching as a response to assaults by black men on white women. Terrell showed how apologists like Page had tried to rationalize what were violent mob actions that were seldom based on assaults.[76] Africian American newspapers such as the Chicago Illinois Newspaper "The Chicago Whip" [77]and the NAACP magazine The Crisis would not just mearly report lynchings they would denounce them as well. Indeed in 1919 the NAACP would Published "Thirty Years of Lynching" and hang a black flag outside its office.

In 1900, as the 56th Congress considered proposals for apportioning its seats among the 45 states following the 1900 Federal Census, Representative Edgar D. Crumpacker (R-IN) filed an independent report urging that the Southern states be stripped of seats due to the large numbers of voters they had disfranchised. He noted this was provided for in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided for stripping representation from states that reduced suffrage due to race.[78] However, concerted opposition of the Southern Democratic bloc was aroused, and the effort failed.

From 1896 until 1900, the House of Representatives with a Republican majority had acted in more than thirty cases to set aside election results from Southern states where the House Elections Committee had concluded that "black voters had been excluded due to fraud, violence, or intimidation". However, in the early 1900s, it began to back off, after Democrats won a majority, which included Southern delegations that were solidly in Democratic hands.

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, a noted anti-lynching politician

President Theodore Roosevelt made public statements against lynching in 1903, following George White's murder in Delaware, and in the 1906 State of the Union Address on December 4, 1906. When Roosevelt suggested that lynching was taking place in the Philippines, Southern senators (all white Democrats) demonstrated their power by a filibuster in 1902 during review of the "Philippines Bill". In 1903 Roosevelt refrained from commenting on lynching during his Southern political campaigns.

Roosevelt published a letter he wrote to Governor Winfield T. Durbin of Indiana in August 1903, saying:

My Dear Governor Durbin ... permit me to thank you as an American citizen for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty of the law by your recent action in reference to lynching. ... All thoughtful men ... must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims – on which occasions the mob seems to lay more weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal. ... There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation...Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.[79]

Durbin had successfully used the Indiana National Guard to disperse lynchers, and publicly declared that an African-American man accused of murder was entitled to a fair trial. Roosevelt's efforts cost him political support among white people, especially in the South. Threats against him increased so that the Secret Service added to the size of his bodyguard detail.[80]

In what has been viewed as multiple acts of resistance, tens of thousands of African Americans left the South annually – especially from 1910 to 1940 – seeking jobs and better lives in industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest in a movement that was called the "Great Migration".[53] More than 1.5 million people went North during this phase of the Great Migration. They refused to live under the rules of segregation and the continual threat of violence, and many secured better educations and futures for themselves and their children, while adapting to the drastically different requirements of industrial cities. Northern industries such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and others, and stockyards and meatpacking plants in Chicago and Omaha, vigorously recruited southern workers. For instance, by 1923, the Pennsylvania Railroad had hired 10,000 black men from Florida and Georgia to work at their expanding yards and tracks.[81]

The rapid influx of blacks disturbed the racial balance within Northern cities, exacerbating hostility between black and white Northerners. The Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the U.S. as a result of race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919. Stereotypic schemas of Southern blacks were used to attribute issues in urban areas, such as crime and disease, to the presence of African Americans. Overall, African Americans in Northern cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Within employment, economic opportunities for blacks were routed to the lowest-status and restrictive in potential mobility. Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of "targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering".[82]

African-American writers used their talents in numerous ways to publicize and protest against lynching. In 1914, Angelina Weld Grimké had already written her play Rachel to address racial violence. It was produced in 1916. In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, noted scholar and head of the recently formed NAACP, called for more black-authored plays.

African-American women playwrights were strong in responding. They wrote ten of the 14 anti-lynching plays produced between 1916 and 1935. The NAACP set up a Drama Committee to encourage such work. In addition, Howard University, the leading historically black college, established a theater department in 1920 to encourage African-American dramatists. Starting in 1924, the NAACP's major publications The Crisis and Opportunity sponsored contests to encourage black literary production.[83]

A scene from the 1915 movie, The Birth of a Nation, showing an African-American character, Gus (played by white actor Walter Long, in blackface), about to be killed by the Ku Klux Klan

In 1915, three events highlighted racial and social tensions: distribution of D.W. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation; the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager, in Atlanta, Georgia; and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan near Atlanta.

D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, glorified the original Klan as protecting southern women during Reconstruction, which he portrayed as a time of violence and corruption, following the Dunning School interpretation of history. The film aroused great controversy. It was popular among whites in the South, but was protested against by the NAACP and other civil rights groups, who achieved banning it in some cities, and it garnered much national publicity.

The lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, on August 17, 1915. Judge Morris, who organized the crowd after the lynching, is on the far right in a straw hat.

In 1915, Leo Frank, an American Jew, was lynched near Atlanta, Georgia. Frank had been convicted in 1913 for the murder of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old girl employed by his pencil factory. There were a series of appeals, but all failed. The final appeal was a 7-2 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. After Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment, a group of men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, kidnapped Frank from a prison farm in Milledgeville in a planned event that included cutting the prison's telephone wires. They transported him 175 miles back to Marietta, near Atlanta, where they lynched him in front of a mob.

On November 25, 1915, two months after Frank was lynched, a group led by William J. Simmons burned a cross on top of Stone Mountain, inaugurating a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The event was attended by 15 charter members and a few aging survivors of the original Klan.[84]

A scene from the 1919 movie, Within Our Gates, showing the lynching of film characters, Jasper Landry and his wife

The Klan and their use of lynching was supported by some public officials like John Trotwood Moore, the State Librarian and Archivist of Tennessee from 1919 to 1929.[85] Moore "became one of the South's more strident advocates of lynching."[85]

The Klan grew after that due to majority of white Protestants' anxieties and fears over the rapid pace of change and economic and social competition. It promoted itself as a fraternal organization for ethnic Northern Europeans in new urban environments. Many African-American migrants moved north in the Great Migration, resulting in labor shortages in most of the rural South. In addition, they also migrated to some rapidly growing Southern industrial cities. At the same time, the United States was receiving millions of immigrants from Mexico, the Middle East, East Asia, and southern and eastern Europe who settled in northeastern, midwestern, and western industrial cities. As a result, the Klan grew rapidly and became most successful and strongest in those cities that had a rapid pace of growth from 1910 to 1930, such as southern cities of Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and Dallas, Texas; and non-southern cities of Detroit, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and Denver, Colorado. It reached a peak of membership and influence about 1925. In some cities, non-Protestant leaders' actions to publish names of Klan members and override its secrecy provided enough publicity to sharply reduce membership.[86]

1919 was one of the worst years for lynching with at least seventy-six people were killed in mob or vigilante related violence. Of these, more than eleven African American veterans who had served in the recently completed war were lynched in that year. [87]^:232

The NAACP mounted a strong nationwide campaign of protests and public education against The Birth of a Nation. As a result, some city governments prohibited the release of the film. In addition, the NAACP publicized production and helped create audiences for the 1919 releases, The Birth of a Race and Within Our Gates, African-American–directed films that presented more positive images of blacks.

On April 1, 1918, U.S. Representative Leonidas C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri, introduced the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Dyer was concerned over increased lynching, mob violence, and disregard for the "rule of law" in the South. The bill made lynching a federal crime, and those who participated in lynching would be prosecuted by the federal government. It did not pass due to a Southern filibuster, and the Senate would not pass anti-lynching legislation until 2018 (the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act).

On 1919, the new NAACP organized the National Conference on Lynching to increase support for the Dyer Bill.

In 1920, the black community succeeded in getting its most important priority in the Republican Party's platform at the National Convention: support for an anti-lynching bill. The black community supported Warren G. Harding in that election, but were disappointed as his administration moved slowly on a bill.[88]

Dyer revised his bill and re-introduced it to the House in 1921. It passed the House on January 22, 1922, due to "insistent country-wide demand",[88] and was favorably reported out by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Action in the Senate was delayed, and ultimately the Democratic Solid South filibuster defeated the bill in the Senate in December.[89] In 1923, Dyer went on a midwestern and western state tour promoting the anti-lynching bill; he praised the NAACP's work for continuing to publicize lynching in the South and for supporting the federal bill. Dyer's anti-lynching motto was "We have just begun to fight," and he helped generate additional national support. His bill was defeated twice more in the Senate by Southern Democratic filibuster. The Republicans were unable to pass a bill in the 1920s.[90]

In the 1921 Tulsa race massacre thousands of whites rampaged through the black community, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes. Up to 300 blacks were killed

African-American resistance to lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a group of African-American citizens attempted to stop a lynch mob from taking 19-year-old assault suspect Dick Rowland out of jail. In a scuffle between a white man and an armed African-American veteran, the white man was killed. Whites retaliated by rioting, during which they burned 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses in the segregated Greenwood district, destroying what had been a thriving area. Confirmed dead were 39 people: 26 African Americans and 13 whites. Recent investigations suggest the number of African-American deaths may have been much higher, up to 300.[91] Rowland was saved, however, and was later exonerated.

Mary Burnett Talbert served as National Director of the NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign in 1921

The growing networks of African-American women's club groups were instrumental in raising funds to support the NAACP's public education and lobbying campaigns. They also built community organizations. In 1922, Mary Talbert headed the anti-lynching crusade to create an integrated women's movement against lynching.[76] It was affiliated with the NAACP, which mounted a multi-faceted campaign. For years the NAACP used petition drives, letters to newspapers, articles, posters, lobbying Congress, and marches to protest against the abuses in the South and keep the issue before the public.

While the second Ku Klux Klan grew rapidly in cities, underwent major change, and achieved some political power, many state and city leaders, including white religious leaders such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, acted strongly and spoke out publicly against the organization. Some anti-Klan groups published members' names and quickly reduced the energy in their efforts. As a result, in most areas, after 1925 Klan membership and organizations rapidly declined. Cities passed laws against wearing of masks, and otherwise acted against the Klan.[92]

In 1930, Southern white women responded in large numbers to the leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames in forming the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She and her co-founders obtained the signatures of 40,000 women to their pledge against lynching and for a change in the South. The pledge included the statement:

In light of the facts we dare no longer to... allow those bent upon personal revenge and savagery to commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women.

Despite physical threats and hostile opposition, the women leaders persisted with petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings, and demonstrations to highlight the issues.[15] By the 1930s, the number of lynchings had dropped to about ten per year in Southern states.

In the 1930s, communist organizations, including a legal defense organization called the International Labor Defense (ILD), organized support to stop lynching (see Communist Party USA and African Americans). The ILD defended the Scottsboro Boys, as well as three black men accused of rape in Tuscaloosa in 1933. In the Tuscaloosa case, two defendants were lynched under circumstances that suggested police complicity. The ILD lawyers narrowly escaped lynching. Many Southerners resented them for their perceived "interference" in local affairs. In a remark to an investigator, a white Tuscaloosan said, "For New York Jews to butt in and spread communistic ideas is too much."[39]

Anti-lynching advocates such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter Francis White campaigned for presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. They hoped he would lend public support to their efforts against lynching. Senators Robert F. Wagner and Edward P. Costigan drafted the Costigan–Wagner Bill in 1934 to require local authorities to protect prisoners from lynch mobs. Like the Dyer Bill, it made lynching a Federal crime in order to take it out of state administration.

Southern Senators continued to hold a hammerlock on Congress. Because of the Southern Democrats' disfranchisement of African Americans in Southern states at the start of the 20th century, Southern whites for decades had nearly double the representation in Congress beyond their own population. Southern states had Congressional representation based on total population, but essentially only whites could vote and only their issues were supported. Due to seniority achieved through one-party Democratic rule in their region, Southern Democrats controlled many important committees in both houses. Southern Democrats consistently opposed any legislation related to putting lynching under Federal oversight. As a result, Southern white Democrats were a formidable power in Congress until the 1960s.

In the 1930s, virtually all Southern senators blocked the proposed Costigan–Wagner Bill. Southern senators used a filibuster to prevent a vote on the bill. Some Republican senators, such as the conservative William Borah from Idaho, opposed the bill for constitutional reasons (he had also opposed the Dyer Bill). He felt it encroached on state sovereignty and, by the 1930s, thought that social conditions had changed so that the bill was less needed.[93] He spoke at length in opposition to the bill in 1935 and 1938. 1934 saw 15 lynchings of African Americans with 21 lynchings in 1935, 8 in 1936, and 2 in 1939.

A lynching in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, changed the political climate in Washington.[94] On July 19, 1935, Rubin Stacy, a homeless African-American tenant farmer, knocked on doors begging for food. After resident complaints, deputies took Stacy into custody. While he was in custody, a lynch mob took Stacy from the deputies and murdered him. Although the faces of his murderers could be seen in a photo taken at the lynching site, the state did not prosecute the murder.[95]

Stacy's murder galvanized anti-lynching activists, but President Roosevelt did not support the federal anti-lynching bill. He feared that support would cost him Southern votes in the 1936 election. He believed that he could accomplish more for more people by getting re-elected.

In 1937, the lynching of Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels gained national publicity, and its brutality was widely condemned.[96] Such publicity enabled Joseph A. Gavagan (D-New York) to gain support for anti-lynching legislation he had put forward in the House of Representatives; it was supported in the Senate by Democrats Robert F. Wagner (New York) and Frederick Van Nuys (Indiana). The legislation eventually passed in the House, but the Solid South of white Democrats blocked it in the Senate.[97][98]

In 1939, Roosevelt created the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. It started prosecutions to combat lynching, but failed to win any convictions until 1946.[99]

The industrial buildup to World War II acted as a "pull" factor in the second phase of the Second Great Migration starting in 1940 and lasting until 1970. Altogether in the first half of the 20th century, 6.5 million African Americans migrated from the South to leave lynchings and segregation behind. Unlike the first round, composed chiefly of rural farmworkers, the second wave included more educated workers and their families who were already living in Southern cities and towns. In this migration, many left for Western cities in addition to Northeastern and Midwestern cities, as defense industries recruited tens of thousands to higher-paying, skilled jobs. They settled in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle.

An FBI poster asking the public for information on the 1946 Moore's Ford lynchings in rural Georgia

In 1946, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department gained its first conviction under federal civil rights laws against a lyncher. Florida constable Tom Crews was sentenced to a $1,000 fine (equivalent to $13,100 in 2019) and one year in prison for civil rights violations in the killing of an African-American farm worker.

In 1946, a mob of white men shot and killed two young African-American couples near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, 60 miles east of Atlanta. This lynching of four young sharecroppers, one a World War II veteran, shocked the nation. The attack was a key factor in President Harry S. Truman's making civil rights a priority of his administration. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the crime, they were unable to prosecute. It was the last documented lynching of so many people in one incident.[99]

In 1947, the Truman administration published a report entitled To Secure These Rights which advocated making lynching a federal crime, abolishing poll taxes, and other civil rights reforms. The Southern Democratic bloc of senators and congressmen continued to obstruct attempts at federal legislation.[100]

In the 1940s, the Klan openly criticized Truman for his efforts to promote civil rights. Later historians documented that Truman had briefly made an attempt to join the Klan as a young man in 1924, when it was near its peak of social influence in promoting itself as a fraternal organization. When a Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics if he were re-elected as county judge, Truman refused. He personally knew their worth from his World War I experience. His membership fee was returned and he never joined the Klan.[101]

International media, including the media in the Soviet Union, covered racial discrimination in the U.S.[45][102] Deeming American criticism of the Soviet Union's human rights abuses as hypocrisy, the Soviets would respond with "And you are lynching Negroes".[103] In his 1934 book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It?, Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Boys and why they lynch Negroes."[104]

In a meeting with President Harry Truman in 1946, Paul Robeson urged him to take action against lynching. In 1951, Robeson and the Civil Rights Congress made a presentation entitled "We Charge Genocide" to the United Nations. They argued that the U.S. government was guilty of genocide under Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention because it failed to act against lynchings. The first year on record with no lynchings reported in the United States was 1952.[105]

In the early Cold War years, the FBI was worried more about possible communist connections among anti-lynching groups than about the lynching crimes. For instance, the FBI branded Albert Einstein a communist sympathizer for joining Robeson's American Crusade Against Lynching.[106] J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI for decades, was particularly fearful of the effects of communism in the United States. He directed more attention to investigations of civil rights groups for communist connections than to Ku Klux Klan activities against the groups' members and other innocent blacks.

By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. Membership in the NAACP increased in states across the country. The NAACP achieved a significant U.S. Supreme Court victory in 1954 ruling that segregated education was unconstitutional. A 1955 lynching that sparked public outrage about injustice was that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago. Spending the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi, Till was killed for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a white woman. Till had been badly beaten, one of his eyes was gouged out, and he was shot in the head before being thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his body weighed down with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket, to show people how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News photographs circulated around the country, and drew intense public reaction. The visceral response to his mother's decision to have an open-casket funeral mobilized the black community throughout the U.S.[107] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted by an all-white jury.[108]

In the 1960s the civil rights movement attracted students to the South from all over the country to work on voter registration and integration. The intervention of people from outside the communities and threat of social change aroused fear and resentment among many whites. In June 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi. They had been investigating the arson of a black church being used as a "Freedom School". Six weeks later, their bodies were found in a partially constructed dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Chaney of Meridian, Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York City had been members of the Congress of Racial Equality. They had been dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination. The investigation also unearthed the bodies of numerous anonymous victims of past lynchings and murders.

The United States prosecuted 18 men for a Ku Klux Klan conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights under 19th-century Federal law, in order to prosecute the crime in Federal court. Seven men were convicted but received light sentences, two men were released because of a deadlocked jury, and the remainder were acquitted. In 2005, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, one of the men who had earlier gone free, was retried by the state of Mississippi, convicted of three counts of manslaughter in a new trial, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Killen died in 2018 after serving ​12 ¹⁄₂ years.

Because of J. Edgar Hoover's and others' hostility to the civil rights movement, agents of the FBI resorted to outright lying to smear civil rights workers and other opponents of lynching. For example, the FBI leaked false information in the press about the lynching victim Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in 1965 in Alabama. The FBI said Liuzzo had been a member of the Communist Party USA, had abandoned her five children, and was involved in sexual relationships with African Americans in the movement.[109]

Although lynchings have become rare following the civil rights movement and changing social norms, some lynchings have still occurred. In 1981, two Klan members in Alabama randomly selected a 19-year-old black man, Michael Donald, and murdered him, in order to retaliate for a jury's acquittal of a black man who was accused of murdering a white police officer. The Klansmen were caught, prosecuted, and convicted (one of the Klansmen, Henry Hayes, was sentenced to death and executed on June 6, 1997). A $7 million judgment in a civil suit against the Klan bankrupted the local Klan subgroup, the United Klans of America.[110]

In 1998, Shawn Allen Berry, Lawrence Russel Brewer, and ex-convict John William King murdered James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Byrd was a 49-year-old father of three, who had accepted an early-morning ride home with the three men. They attacked him and dragged him to his death behind their truck.[111] The three men dumped their victim's mutilated remains in the town's segregated African-American cemetery and then went to a barbecue.[112] Local authorities immediately treated the murder as a hate crime and requested FBI assistance. The murderers (two of whom turned out to be members of a white supremacist prison gang) were caught and stood trial. Brewer and King were both sentenced to death (with Brewer being executed in 2011, and King being executed in 2019). Berry was sentenced to life in prison.

On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for its failure to enact a federal anti-lynching law in the early 20th century, "when it was most needed". Before the vote, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu noted: "There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility."[113] The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 senators cosponsoring, with Mississippians Thad Cochran and Trent Lott being among the twenty U.S. senators abstaining.[113] The resolution expressed "the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States".[113]

In February 2014 a noose was placed on the statue of James Meredith, the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi.[114] A number of nooses appeared in 2017, primarily in or near Washington, D.C.[115][116][117]

In August 2014 Lennon Lacy, a teenager from Bladenboro, North Carolina, who had been dating a white girl, was found dead, hanging from a swing set. His family believes he was lynched, but the FBI stated, after investigation, that it found no evidence of a hate crime. The case is featured in a 2019 documentary about lynching in America, Always in Season.[118]

In May 2017, Mississippi state representative Karl Oliver of Winona stated that Louisiana lawmakers who supported the removal of Confederate monuments from their state should be lynched. Oliver's district includes Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was murdered. Mississippi leaders from both the Republican and Democratic parties quickly condemned Oliver's statement.[119]

In 2019, Goodloe Sutton, then editor of a small Alabama newspaper, The Democrat-Reporter, got national publicity by saying in an editorial that the Ku Klux Klan was needed to "clean up D.C."[120] Asked what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.", he suggested lynching: "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them." "When asked if he felt it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position: …'It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?'" He denied that the Klan was a racist and violent organization, comparing it to the NAACP.[121]

On January 6, 2021 the rioters during the 2021 Storming of the United States Capitol shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" in an attempt to lynch the Vice-President for refusing to overturn the 2020 United States Presidential Election in favor of President Donald Trump.[122]

On June 30, 2018, three senators (Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Tim Scott) introduced the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act to make lynching a Federal hate crime.[123] The Senate voted unanimously in favor of it on December 19, 2018.[124][125] However, the bill died because it was not passed by the House before the 115th Congress ended on January 3, 2019.[126]

Sponsored by Bobby Rush, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act by a vote of 410–4 on February 26, 2020, designating the act of lynching as a hate crime. During the floor debate, Rush said the bill's passage would "send a strong message that violence, and race-based violence in particular, has no place in American society."[127] The bill was reported out of the House Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2019, and was passed by the House, 410-4, on February 26, 2020.[128]

As of June 4, 2020, while protests and civil unrest over the killing of George Floyd were occurring nationwide, the bill was being considered by the Senate, with Senator Rand Paul preventing the bill from being passed by unanimous consent. Paul opposes the bill's language for being overly broad, including attacks which he felt were not extreme enough to qualify as "lynching", stating that "this bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion" and has proposed an amendment that would apply a "serious bodily injury standard" for a crime to be considered as lynching.[129][130][131]

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer criticized Rand Paul's position, saying on Twitter that "it is shameful that one GOP Senator is standing in the way of seeing this bill become law." Senator Kamala Harris added that "Senator Paul is now trying to weaken a bill that was already passed — there's no reason for this" while speaking to have the amendment defeated.[131][129]

As of November 17, 2020, no legislation has passed both houses of Congress.

• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an 1885 novel, depicts attempted (although failed) lynching as a minor episode.
• Owen Wister's The Virginian, a 1902 seminal novel in the genre of Western novels in the United States, dealt with a fictional treatment of the Johnson County War and frontier lynchings in the West.
• Tracked by Bloodhounds; or, A Lynching at Cripple Creek, a 1904 silent crime drama short film directed by Harry Buckwalter.
• Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel (1914) was the first play about the toll of racial violence directed at African-American families; it was produced in 1916.
• Following the commercial and critical success of D. W. Griffith's film, Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Ku Klux Klan for its violence during Reconstruction, African-American director and writer Oscar Micheaux responded in 1919 with the film Within Our Gates. The climax of the film is the lynching of a black family after one member of the family is wrongly accused of murder. Considered a commercial failure, the film was an inductee of the 1992 National Film Registry list.[141]
• Regina M. Anderson's play, Climbing Jacob's Ladder, was about a lynching; it was performed by the Krigwa Players (later called the Negro Experimental Theater), a Harlem theatre company.
• William Faulkner's short story "Dry September" (1931) tells the story of a lynch mob forming in response to an alleged offense against a white woman.
• Lynd Ward's 1932 book Wild Pilgrimage (printed in woodblock prints, with no text) includes three prints of the lynching of several black men.
• In Irving Berlin's 1933 musical, As Thousands Cheer, Ethel Waters sang a ballad about lynching, "Supper Time". She wrote in her 1951 autobiography, His Eye Was on the Sparrow: "if one song could tell the story of an entire race, that was it."
• Murder in Harlem (1935), by director Oscar Micheaux, was one of three films he made based on events in the controversial trial of Leo Frank, a northern Jewish man convicted of murder of a Georgia factory girl. He portrayed the character analogous to Frank as guilty and set the film in New York, removing sectional conflict as one of the cultural forces in the trial. Micheaux's first version was a silent film, The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921). Lem Hawkins Confession (1935) was also related to the Leo Frank trial.[142]
• John Steinbeck's short story "The Vigilante" (1936) is retrospectively concerned with a lynching as seen by one of the chief participants in it. The story is based on historical events, namely the 1933 lynchings of John Maurice Holmes and Thomas Harold Thurmond in San Jose, California, on November 16, 1933.[143]
• The film They Won't Forget (1937) was inspired by the Frank case; it featured the Leo Frank character portrayed as a Christian.
• In Fury (1936), the German expatriate Fritz Lang depicts a lynch mob burning down a jail in which Joe Wilson (played by Spencer Tracy) was held as a suspect in a kidnapping, a crime for which Wilson was soon after cleared. Lang had left Germany after the Nazis came to power. The story was based on a 1933 lynching in San Jose, California. This had been recorded on newsreel footage and was an event in which Governor of California James Rolph refused to intervene.
• In Walter Van Tilburg Clark's 1940 novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, two drifters are drawn into a Western posse formed to find the murderer of a local man. After suspicion centered on three innocent cattle rustlers, they were lynched, an injustice that deeply affected the drifters. The novel was adapted as a 1943 film by the same name. It symbolized a wartime defense of United States' values, seen to be based on law, versus the characterization of Nazi Germany as mob rule.
• Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), featured a black man, Tom Robinson, who is wrongfully accused of rape and narrowly escapes lynching. After having been wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury, Robinson is later killed while attempting to escape from prison. The novel was adapted as a 1962 film of the same name starring Gregory Peck.
• "Going to Meet the Man" (1965) is a short story by James Baldwin that includes an account of a particularly horrific lynching.
• The 1968 film Hang 'Em High, set on the Western frontier, stars Clint Eastwood.
• The 1988 film Mississippi Burning includes a depiction of a black man being lynched.
• Peter Matthiessen depicted several lynchings in his Killing Mr. Watson trilogy (first volume published in 1990), set in Florida of the late 19th century.[144]
• "A Party Down at the Square" (first published in 1997) is a short story by Ralph Ellison that describes a lynching from the point of view of a white boy from Cincinnati.[145]
• Vendetta, a 1999 HBO film starring Christopher Walken and directed by Nicholas Meyer, is based on events that took place in New Orleans in 1891. After the acquittal of 18 Italian-American men falsely accused of the murder of police chief David Hennessy, a lynch mob attacked them, killing 11 by shooting or hanging in one of the largest mass lynchings in United States history.
• Jason Robert Brown's musical Parade tells the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched near Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1900s after being convicted of murder of a young factory girl in a highly biased trial.
• The 2014 biopic Get On Up about the life of American singer James Brown features a scene in which a young Brown finds the body of a lynched man hanging from a tree near Brown's childhood home.
• Quentin Tarantino's film The Hateful Eight (2015), set in the Reconstruction era, features a finale with a detailed depiction of the lynching of a white woman identified as a working-class racist Southerner, with graphic focus on her suffering, prompting some debate among critics about whether it is a political commentary on racism and hate in America or simply sensational and sexist exploitation.[146][147][148]

Among artistic works that grappled with lynching was the song "Strange Fruit", written as a poem by Abel Meeropol in 1939 and recorded by Billie Holiday.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
scent of magnolia
sweet and fresh
then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit
for the crows to pluck
for the rain to gather
for the wind to suck
for the sun to rot
for the tree to drop
Here is a strange
and bitter crop

Although Holiday's regular label Columbia declined, Holiday recorded it for Commodore Records. The song became identified with her and was one of her most popular ones. The song became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement. It also contributed to activism of the American civil rights movement. A documentary about a lynching and the effects of protest songs and art, entitled Strange Fruit (2002) and produced by Public Broadcasting Service, was aired on U.S. television.[149]

In 1933, California defined lynching, punishable by 2–4 years in prison, as "the taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer", with the crime of "riot" defined as two or more people using violence or the threat of violence.[155] It does not refer to lynching homicide, and has been used to charge individuals who have tried to free someone in police custody – leading to controversy.[156][157] In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation by Senator Holly Mitchell removing the word "lynching" from the state's criminal code without comment after it received unanimous approval in a vote by state lawmakers. Mitchell stated, "It's been said that strong words should be reserved for strong concepts, and 'lynching' has such a painful history for African Americans that the law should only use it for what it is - murder by mob." The law was otherwise unchanged.[155]

In 1899, Indiana passed anti-lynching legislation. It was enforced by Governor Winfield T. Durbin, who forced investigation into a 1902 lynching and removed the sheriff responsible. In 1903 he sent militia to bring order to a race riot which had broken out on Independence Day in Evansville, Indiana. In 1920, 600 men attempted to remove a black prisoner from Marion County Jail, but were prevented by the city's police.[158][159] Lawrence Beitler photographed the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in 1930[160] in Marion, Indiana. Seeing this image inspired Abel Meeropol to write the song "Strange Fruit",[161] which was popularized by singer Billie Holiday. In reaction to these murders, Flossie Bailey pushed for passage[162] of the 1931 Indiana anti-lynching law.[163] The law provided for the immediate dismissal of any sheriff who allowed a jailed person to be lynched, and allowed the victim's family to sue for $10,000. However, local authorities failed to prosecute mob leaders. In one case when a sheriff was indicted by Indiana's attorney general, James Ogden, the jury refused to convict.[158][159]

In an odd turn, in 1951 South Carolina passed a law criminalizing second-degree lynching, which it defined as "any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person and from which death does not result shall constitute the crime of lynching in the second degree and shall be a felony. Any person found guilty of lynching in the second degree shall be confined at hard labor in the State Penitentiary for a term not exceeding twenty years nor less than three years, at the discretion of the presiding judge."[164] By 2003, however, all but two of the state's 46 counties charged blacks with second-degree lynching out of proportion to their representation in the population. In the prior 5 years, 4,000 adults were charged, and 136 were convicted. Black suspects were convicted of this assault charge at twice the rate of white suspects. 1,400 juvenile lynching charges were filed, and, in 2002, 231 black youths were convicted, ten times as many as white youths.[165][166] In 2006, five white teenagers were given various sentences for second-degree lynching in a non-lethal attack on a young black man in South Carolina.[167] In 2010, the South Carolina Sentencing Reform Commission voted to rename the law "assault and battery by a mob," and to soften consequences for situations in which no one was killed or seriously injured in an attack by two or more people on a single victim.[168][169]