According to one version, the Lynch Court was named after the American judge Charles Lynch, who practiced lynching during the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783. In the state of Virginia, Virginia, Charles Lynch personally passed convictions against military and criminals. By his order, without prosecutors and lawyers, people were deprived of their lives. In fact, this was a gross violation of the law and the rights of citizens. But many believe that such actions were justified, since the time was harsh, military. There was an unstable political situation in the country and his actions were simplified wartime justice, with the only difference that the verdict was passed by a civilian judge. That's an excuse huh? And the Soviets famously declared their "dictatorship of the proletariat" as inappropriate to "democracy and violation of human rights." Well this is a separate topic.
According to another version, the name of the Lynch Court comes from the surname of Captain William Lynch, who introduced the "Lynch Law" in the state of Pennsylvania on extrajudicial corporal punishment.
His service took place in the state of Pennsylvania. In 1780, William Lynch used his personal authority and the support of his co-workers to sentence people to corporal punishment. At the same time, mostly blacks were beaten. That is, there was obvious racism on the face.
Since then, it has become customary to call courts without the participation of prosecutors, defense and jury lynching courts. The crowd was always the executor of the sentence. Sometimes sheriffs led her, but more often the popular anger arose spontaneously. An uncontrollable mass of people swept away everything in its path and destroyed the criminal or criminals. The police, as a rule, saw everything, but preferred not to interfere.
It often happened that innocent people were “punished”.
In 1913, the corpse of a 13-year-old girl named Mary Fagan was found in the basement of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia. She worked in a factory doing simple things like attaching erasers to pencils. The doctors determined that she was beaten, raped and strangled. The murder of a girl, almost a child, caused a loud resonance in society. The best detectives of the city police department were thrown in search of the villain.
The very next day, the "villain" was found. It turned out to be the factory manager, 29-year-old Leo Frank.
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On the day of Mary Fagan's murder, he gave her a salary and was the last person to communicate with her. A trial took place, but the prosecutor built the prosecution on circumstantial evidence. The testimony of a black worker, Jim Conley, was decisive. He allegedly saw Leo Frank walking somewhere with Mary Fagan.
Under pressure from public opinion, the manager was sentenced to death, but many prominent American lawyers strongly opposed such a sentence. They considered that the evidence base is very weak: there are many “blank spots” and ambiguities in it. Based on this, Governor John Slayton commuted the execution to life imprisonment.
This decision caused a storm of indignation among the inhabitants of Atlanta. Voters unanimously expressed no confidence in the governor, and he was forced to resign. But Leo Frank survived. He began serving a life sentence at the county jail in Milledgeville, just 130 kilometers southeast of Atlanta. This turned out to be a serious mistake of justice.
Late in the evening of August 17, 1915, an armed group of Atlanteans appeared on the streets of Milledgeville. These people arrived on horseback, and their eyes burned with a thirst for just retribution. They were joined by local residents and an aggressive crowd broke into the prison.
The guards were disarmed, the telephone wires were cut. Leo Frank, who was serving a life sentence, was seized, tied up, thrown over the rump of a horse and taken to the city of Marietta. Today it is a suburb of Atlanta, and at that time the town was located a few kilometers from the state capital.
It was from Marietta that Mary Fagan was killed. They buried her in the city cemetery, and they decided to punish the murderer nearby in an oak grove.
Before the lynching, Leo Frank was asked to confess his guilt. But he declared that he was innocent. Then the former manager of the pencil factory was dragged to a tree from which a rope with a noose was already hanging and hung. The crowd was out for blood and got what they wanted.
The next day, local residents reached out to the tree on which the corpse of the hanged criminal was hanging. Many were photographed next to the executed. Towards evening, the police appeared. They removed the body from the noose, but did not say a word to the crowd that surrounded them on all sides. No one was punished for the arbitrary execution. But the Leo Frank case was continued after 67 years.
In 1982, a certain Alonso Mann, who in 1913 was a little older than the murdered Mary Fagan and worked as a messenger in Leo Frank's office, said that he saw a black worker Jim Conley carrying the girl's body somewhere on his shoulder. The Negro frightened Mann. He stated that he would kill him if he even said a word to the police. For almost 70 years, Mann was silent. But at the end of his life, he decided to relieve his soul in order to die peacefully and at least to some extent deserve the forgiveness of God.
Alonso Mann's testimony changed everything radically. But the criminal case had already been destroyed, and Jim Conley passed away in 1962. So there was no way to reopen the investigation and punish the real culprit. The only thing that the state authorities could do was to acquit the innocently convicted Leo Frank posthumously. The grandchildren of the executed were paid monetary compensation.
This case can also be attributed to interracial, since Leo Frank was a Jew by nationality. After the events of the summer of 1915, many members of the Jewish community left Georgia. In the United States, the so-called Anti-Defamation League was created - a human rights organization that opposed all manifestations of anti-Semitism.
And yet, as a rule, real criminals were punished. People who committed crimes were caught by local residents, in hot pursuit, there were many witnesses to the crime and many who wanted to immediately punish the offender.
In the United States, lynching existed in parallel with official law from 1882 to 1936. During this period, almost 5,650 people were lynched. But this does not mean that all the criminals were hanged, burned and killed by an angry crowd. Such cases accounted for only 0.5%. Basically, lynching consisted in the moral humiliation of people who broke the law.
They were stripped naked, smeared with tar, dumped in feathers, put on a cart and in this form were taken around the city amid the laughter and hooting of the crowd. Often, the criminals were simply beaten, many after this remained crippled, disabled. Having had fun, the victim was released on all four sides. As a rule, this event had a very strong psychological and educational effect. The lynching victim disappeared from the city forever and never bothered the citizens.
It was a lesson for potential criminals as well.
Negroes were also lynched simply because they have black skin. This was practiced mainly by the Ku Klux Klan. But here they weren't limited to feathers and tar. Negroes were simply killed, hanged or burned at the stake. The peak of this was in the last years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century.
In 1869, the first general document was issued, defining the nature of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan for the next several decades. The document contained the following:
- Ku Klux Klan is not an institution of violence, lawlessness or aggression, it is not militant or revolutionary;
- The Ku Klux Klan is basically an organization created for protection, it seeks to fulfill the law, not to resist it;
- The Ku Klux Klan is not an enemy of the blacks as long as they behave accordingly and do not interfere in our affairs;
- if the blacks go to war against us, then they will face terrible retribution.
The crowd of ordinary townspeople hungry for immediate justice and the members of the Ku Klux Klan, when it came to punishing a criminal, especially if he was black, acted about the same.
The culprit had no chance of staying alive.
If you trace the history of the lynching courts, you can see how the executions changed.
Over the years, the executions became more sophisticated and cruel. Often, the crowd didn’t manage to simply hang, over the criminal, sometimes still alive, they mocked, the body was burned, they shot at him. After that, a photo was taken for memory, which were often attended by children.
January 15, 1889, Pratt Mines, Alabama.
One of the earliest photos of the lynching. Black George Meadows raped a white woman and killed her son. Hanged by the crowd. Then he was shot from 500 barrels of various firearms.
1893, Paris, Texas.
Black Henry Smith killed the three-year-old son of a local police officer. Smith was lynched in front of 10,000 spectators. First, the relatives of the deceased child (father, uncle and 12-year-old brother) publicly tortured Smith with a red-hot iron, burning various parts of his body. Then Smith was burned at the stake.
Relatives of the murdered man torture Henry Smith. 1893, Paris, Texas, USA.
May 25, 1911, Okema, Oklahoma.
Laura Nelson and her 15-year-old son were hanged.
On the eve of the execution, deputy sheriff 35-year-old George Loney, investigating the theft of a cow, came to the house of suspects Nelsons. He was shot on the doorstep with a rifle.
The initiators of the execution were local residents, who were outraged, first of all, by the fact that a white representative of the law was killed by blacks.
Laura Nelson and her son were hanged on the local bridge, but father, the elder Nelson, escaped punishment, they managed to take him to a prison in another city. By the way, it was he who stole the cow.
May 15, 1916, Waco, Texas.
Jesse Washington, 17, admitted in court that he killed a white woman and was sentenced to be hanged. However, immediately after the verdict was announced, the crowd in the hall went into a rage, dragged Washington out of the courtroom and he was immediately burned at the stake in the square in the presence of 15,000 spectators. Then the charred corpse with severed limbs was hanged. Fingers and toes were cut off and taken away for souvenirs.
By the way, this is not just a photo, but a postcard. This Texas guy on the left, leaning against a post, is Joe. He sent this photo to his mother, writing on the back: “This is the Barbeque we had last night. My is to the left with a cross over it. Your son Joe "(" This is the barbecue we had last night. I'm on the left at the pillar with the cross. Your son Joe ").
Such postcards with hung blacks came into fashion in the 1900s. Next to the hanged, as a rule, funny and laughing participants in the lynching court pose, they sent them to their relatives with comments like "Mom, it's me on the left." The federal government banned this type of postage in 1908, but it was illegally printed and circulated until the 1930s.
September 28, 1919, Omaha, Nebraska.
Perhaps the most famous and brutal lynching that took place in 1919 over black Will Brown. Brown was accused of raping a 19-year-old white girl. Local newspapers launched a campaign about the constant attacks of blacks on white women in the city. Finally, on September 28, 1919, an angry mob of more than 4,000 white Americans stormed the city court, dragged the accused out of there, and immediately hanged him.
Then hundreds of revolvers and rifles were fired into the dead body. The body was then removed, tied to a car and dragged through the streets. Then they threw it on the ground, doused it with fuel and burned it. Then we took a picture for memory. The police saw everything, but did not intervene in what was happening.
The photo shows Brown's charred corpse with severed limbs and smiling judges.
1920, Minnesota.
Photo after the lynching of three blacks.
It was not possible to establish the names of the people and for that they were executed.
According to the established tradition, a group photo was taken, many are smiling.
Such outrageous cases of mass atrocities became more and more. As a result, anti-lynching organizations emerged. Journalist Ida Wells conducted an investigation, during which she found that of 728 blacks, 70% were executed for minor offenses. At the beginning of the twentieth century. A campaign against the methods of lynching began, and gradually this practice began to decline, although isolated cases of lynching in the United States were recorded until the end of the 20th century.
Although lynching was often condemned by the federal government (especially the Republican Party), there was virtually no legal opposition to these actions: the authorities of the southern states and counties, as a rule, consisted of individuals who saw lynching as a traditional self-defense against the numerous atrocities of blacks. There were cases when the crowd immediately dragged a Negro who was acquitted by a lawful court and leaving the courtroom, and the judge did not interfere with this. In the first half of the 20th century, cases of conviction of participants in lynching are rare.
The Democratic presidents, F. D. Roosevelt (who in 1936 did not dare to pass harsh laws against lynching, fearing losing the support of southern voters), and especially H. Truman, began the fight against the lynching trial.
After World War II, lynching became a completely isolated practice, usually associated with private terror by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and each time it was subject to investigation.
