LYNCHING is the barbaric public killing of an accused criminal which is carried out by hanging the individual and stringing them up with a rope or similar material.

The practice was weaponized against African-Americans during the late 1800s, as well as during the Civil Rights Movement – action was taken against the act of lynching when United States lawmakers passed a bill criminalizing and condemning it on March 7, 2022.

What is lynching and where did it originate?

Lynching is a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses and is performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes without due process of law.

It is often carried out in the presence of witnesses and for public spectacle.

Lynching takes place under the pretext of administering justice without trial, which sees the execution of a presumed offender often after they are tortured and mutilated.

Lynching is usually death by hanging.

The term lynch law refers to a self-constituted court that imposes a sentence on a person without due process of law.

The term lynchin’ is derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736–96), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace who headed an irregular court formed to punish loyalists during the American Revolution.

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When was the punishment used in America?

Lynchings in the United States rose in number after the American Civil War in the late 1800s, following the emancipation of slaves.

The practice declined after 1930 but there are incidences recorded into the 1960s.

Lynchings most frequently targeted African-American men and women in the South, with some also occurring in Midwestern and Border States, especially during the 20th-century Great Migration of blacks out of the South.

After the war, southern whites struggled to maintain their social dominance leading to the rise of secret vigilante and insurgent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

These groups instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings in order to keep whites in power and discourage freedmen from voting, working and getting educated.

They also sometimes attacked Northerners, teachers, and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau.

A study of the period from 1868 to 1871 estimates that the KKK was involved in more than 400 lynchings.

Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black.

Lynching continued to be associated with US racial unrest during the 1950s and 60s, when civil rights workers and advocates were threatened and in some cases killed by mobs.

Who was Emmet Till?

Emmet Till was a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago.

He had been visiting relatives in Mississippi during the summer of 1955 when a white store clerk accused him of grabbing her waist and hands, flirting with her and whistling at her.

This accusation has been disputed throughout history, with historian Timothy Tyson alleging that the store clerk, a woman named Carolyn Bryant had admitted to him during a bombshell interview that some of the claims were made up.

Till's friends who were with him at the store also denied any flirting and grabbing took place, and say Till had whistled at a game of checkers being played across the street – not at Bryant.

Till's mother also said the boy had speech issues and would sometimes whistle to help him pronounce "b" sounds, in this case likely preparing himself to ask for bubblegum.

Bryant, then 21, didn't initially tell her husband, 24-year-old Roy Bryant about Till coming into the store and "flirting" for fear he would beat him up.

However, her husband was told by someone who saw the pair interacting.

Bryant then kidnapped, mutilated and shot Till before dumping his body in a river.

Till's mother requested an open-casket funeral where the 14-year-old's body was paraded through the streets.

The horrific murder drew attention to the demonisation of black men in the south, especially after Bryant and his accomplice were acquitted of the boy's murder.

Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

What is the Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Bill?

The anti-lynching bill, introduced in 1918 by Leonidas Dyer aimed to establish lynching as a federal crime.

The bill was passed in December 1922, but was blocked from becoming law by Southern Democrats who recruited disenfranchised black Americans into their ranks to exceed their percentage of the population.

Between 1882 to 1968, 200 similar anti-lynching bills were pushed through Congress but not one was approved by the senate due to the Southern Democrats.

It wasn't until 2018 that the Senate would pass the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act.

And on February 27, 2020, the House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act, a revised version of the 2018 bill.

The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act designates lynching as a federal hate crime punishable by life in prison, a fine, or both.

On March 7, 2022, the United States Senate passed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act which states lynching is punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

The bill further specifies that a crime can be determined as a lynching if the victim suffers death or sustains injuries as a result.

Representative Bobby Rush, a longtime sponsor of the bill, said in a press release on March 7: "Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy."

Adding: "Unanimous Senate passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act sends a clear and emphatic message that our nation will no longer ignore this shameful chapter of our history and that the full force of the U.S. federal government will always be brought to bear against those who commit this heinous act."

What happened to Sebastian Woodroffe?

Sebastian Woodroffe was a Canadian citizen who had been living in the Amazonian region of Ucayali.

The 41-year-old was murdered by an angry mob who believed he had killed an elderly medicine woman.
He was allegedly a client of Olivia Arevalo, a traditional healer of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe who was killed on April 19, 2018.
He was not named by law enforcement officials as a suspect in her murder.

Some villagers had blamed Arevalo’s murder on Woodroffe – despite never being named as a suspect.

They took matters into their own hands in 2018 and lynched the Canadian national.

The horrific crime was discovered after harrowing footage of the lynching began circulating on the internet.

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