The word “lynch” has become synonymous with a white mob brutally killing a black person. The bulk of the time, lynchings did happen along those color lines. But not always. In a fourth of the known cases, a white, Asian, or Native person was the unfortunate victim.
The Reader's Companion to American History cites the universally referenced figures on mob hangings collected by the venerable Tuskegee Institute: “Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women.” In other words, 27.3 percent were of other races.
The official website for the State of Texas says that in one the worst years (1885), lynch mobs in the state murdered 24 white people and 19 black people. In the year with the highest number of mob hangings (1892), 30 percent of the victims were white. In Kentucky, the overall tally was 31 percent white.
Naturally, it was almost always white mobs that killed white people, though there are a miniscule number of cases in which a black mob strung up a white person.
Also, we know of rare instances in which black mobs lynched black individuals. Eleven such incidents are known to have occurred in Georgia alone.
Most of the victims classified as “white” were US-born people of European extraction. However, this category also encompasses Mexicans (a minimum of 216 victims) and European immigrants. Some additional victims were targeted for being Jewish.
Adding further complexity are the victims of other races, including Native Americans and Chinese immigrants.
Although lynching was primarily white on black, the full picture — which has yet to be drawn but is hinted at here — shows that the contours of lynching aren't as simply rendered as we'd like to think.