LYNCHING AS SOCIAL CONTROL
The social hierarchy created by Jim Crow Laws, with people of European descent at the top, could not work without violence being used against those being forcibly kept on the bottom rung. Lynching was terrorism, directed 72 percent of recorded lynching incidences towards African Americans, to keep them in their place in the 'caste' system and to enforce an unnatural state of economic and social segregation between human beings. To survive under the legal and social system in place in the South between 1880 and 1954, a person of African descent had to carefully limit his contact with whites to such socially and legally sanctioned careers such as laborer, barbering and domestic - and beyond this keep totally apart and maintain a subservient attitude. George Fredrickson, a historian, stated it this way: "Lynching represented...a way of using fear and terror to check 'dangerous' tendencies in a Black community considered to be ineffectively regimented or supervised. As such it constituted a confession that the regular institutions of a segregated society provided an inadequate measure of day-to-day control."
A lynching many times took on a medieval carnival atmosphere with victims being dismembered and burned live at the stake or hung. Parts of the victim were sometimes sold as souvenirs to spectators. It was socially acceptable for whole families to travel from miles away to witness the event. Sometimes special trains for attendees were run by the local railroad company if an especially big turnout was expected.
News media then, as today, was geared towards entertainment and the newspapers would publish blow-by-blow sensational accounts of lynching activities. Lynching was the socially condoned pornography of the early part of the 19th century.
http://www.ga3d.net/sweetauburn/intro.htm see lynching link