Latino gang accused of targeting blacks in Los Angeles

Following the Civil War and the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, the lynching of African-American and other "colored" people known as Negroes grew to epidemic proportions. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, so-called "nigger hunts" in the Deep South probably claimed thousands of lives -- although most are unknown, unrecorded deaths. The practice of lynching also targeted Dixie's white men and women for interfering with "Judge Lynch justice" against the Negroes, and for aiding the escape of runaway or other slaves (i.e. abolitionists). Underlying the dynamics of eleven Italians becoming lynched scapegoats in 1891 New Orleans, following the murder of a popular policeman, were economic considerations grounded in race and ethnicity. Sometimes economic motives to lynch were more obvious -- as with the lynching of union activists. Lynching in the Wild West experienced its most brazen period primarily depicted as the extralegal killings of suspected desperados while also featuring waves of indiscriminate terror waged against Hispanic peoples (chiefly Mexicans), Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. The lynching of Mexican civilians by duly commissioned Texas Rangers and self-appointed vigilante groups claimed the second largest group of American ethnic-racial victims with a documented 605 individual cases occurring between 1848 and 1928. Other victims of the pervasive practice included Australian immigrants to America's Far Western states, people with disfigured faces and queer folk -- perhaps those effeminate or single men suspected of sexual indiscretions committed against women or children if not also known homosexuals.

After 1880, the lynching of African-American men, women, and children began to acquire its most sinister and ritualistic form. Negroes become primary targets of white bigots defending the bankrupt premise of white supremacy in its various guises. Unlawful executions occasionally became mass entertainment "spectacle" events bolstered by a burgeoning consumerism.