Lynching Law and Legal Definition
A lynching is a killing by a mob of people. In efforts to lobby Congress to enact a law against lynchings, in 1921 the NAACP proposed setting the size of the mob at no fewer than five. The NAACP later agreed that for a killing to qualify as a lynching, the killers had to act under pretext of service to justice, their race or tradition. Lynchings were more common in the post-Reconstruction South, where southern whites used lynching and other terror tactics to intimidate blacks into political, social, and economic submission.
