Lynching, the illegal killing of a person accused of a crime, victimized racial minorities as well as whites. But 72.7 percent of its reported 4,743 victims from 1882 to 1968 were black and mostly men. Lynchings clustered in southern and border states, and usually were perpetrated by white mobs or groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Victims were hanged, shot, and burned, their corpses often mutilated. During Reconstruction and afterward, the freedmen's state conventions, Negro National Convention, National Association of Colored Women, and black press decried lynching and demanded “the equal protection of the laws.” John Mitchell, Jr. of the Richmond Planet and Ida B. Wells of the Memphis Free Speech called for the arrest, prosecution, and punishment of lynchers. Wells, who moved to New York City after receiving death threats, disproved that rape of white women explained most lynchings of black men.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the movement pursued a federal antilynching law. It enlisted an interracial coalition of the NAACP, which started a fund “to stamp out lynching” in 1916; the southern Commission on Interracial Cooperation; and black churches. Joining them were the National Council of Negro Women, Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and leftist International Labor Defense. Southern white liberals stressed local and state steps such as white–black dialogue and jail security for prisoners. But the NAACP led in lobbying the New Deal Administration for antilynching legislation. Although this took time, its activism advanced public opinion on the protection of life. Sixteen states passed laws against mob violence between the 1890s and early 1940s; the US House enacted bills in 1922, 1937, and 1940, but the Senate defeated them. Antilynching sanctions finally came with Civil and Voting Rights acts in 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965, enforced by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.