Lynching
A lynching is the murder of an accused person, often preceded by torture, by three or more killers (99% of whom were never punished or even charged with a crime) who acted under the pretext of service to justice without allowing the accused person to undergo a trial. Lynchings were a form of social control whereby a victim's family, friends, and other community members were forced to adopt a public code of silence about the lynching or fear for their own lives. The identity of lynchers was almost always known, and local police often facilitated the act, and local press often praised it.
Mob killings are not just a modern phenomenon but have occurred occasionally all through history in various places. But lynching became a particularly common occurrence for a period of about 80 years in the United States. Before anti-lynching laws brought the practice to a halt in the mid-20th century, lynching was a particular danger to people of color in the Southern states where slavery had existed. The vast majority of all lynchings occurred in the U.S. southern states which had a relatively large proportion of African American residents who had been freed from slavery. Lynching also commonly occurred in states and territories such as Kentucky and Missouri where slavery was in danger of becoming established at the time of the Civil War. As an example, the U.S. state of Mississippi had 581 confirmed lynchings between the years of 1882 and 1940, with 42 white victims and 539 African American victims. This is more than any other state. It is safe to say that blacks in the U.S. South, and sometimes white people who befriended blacks, lived in fear of becoming a target of lynching. In contrast, some states far removed from the South hae no reported lynchings at all.
It is worth noting that, even after the practice of lynching died down, in U.S. states where it had been frequent, racism continued to be enforced by a portion of the population by threatening the livelihood or social acceptance of anyone who fraternized across races. In some cases, death threats were still frequently issued (and violence such as bombings) still continued via the Ku Klux Klan and other secretive white-supremacist, hate-mongering organizations.