ABSTRACT
Lynching in many countries has often been carried out in similar ways, although the factors behind mob violence, the color or race of the victims, and society’s responses have differed widely. This chapter describes the dynamics of lynching, revealing patterns that say much about what provokes mob murder and what it is supposed to accomplish, besides killing the person in the mob’s hands. The background of collective murder in America and abroad will be explored in Chapters 2 and 3. Lynching outside the US has typically involved murderers and victims of the same race; therefore examining the processes of collective murder both here and abroad is a start toward sorting out how much American lynching was due to racism and how much to other kinds of circumstances, social, economic, and political.
