During the 19th century long into the 20th century lynching, became a popular form of punishment. Generally this punishment was only reserved for the most vile of criminals, but during this particular time in our history being a specific ethnicity was the crime, racial tension grew throughout the United States and lynching was often accompanied by sever beatings, and humiliating taunts issued by a leering crowd. Lynching, in the United States, has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the American frontier, Reconstruction, and the American Civil Rights Movement. Originally, lynching meant any extra-judicial punishment, including tarring and feathering and running out of town, but during the 19th century in the United States, it began to be used to refer specifically to murder, usually by hanging. lynching was seen by some as a positive alternative and by others a negative alternative.

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On the American frontier, where the power of the police and the army was tenuous to, lynching was seen by some as a positive alternative complete lawlessness. In the Reconstruction-era South, lynching of blacks was used, especially by the first Ku Klux Klan, as a tool for reversing the social changes brought on by Federal occupation. This type of racially motivated lynching continued in the Jim Crow era as a way of enforcing subservience and preventing economic competition, and into the twentieth century as a method of resisting the civil rights movement.
More recently, lynching has come to have a contemporary informal use as a label for social vilification, particularly in the media, and particularly of