Lynching of Andrew Richards
lynching of a black man in Illinois
A mob of white Winchester, Illinois, residents lynched Andrew Richards, a black man, on September 11, 1877. He was forcibly taken from the Winchester, Illinois jail by a mob of several hundred people. He was accused of the rape of a white woman, Mrs. John Pruitt, in a nearby orchard.
Background information on lynching
A misconception about lynching was that it was confined solely to southern practice. However, lynching took place all across the United States in almost every state. Lynchings are acts of extrajudicial killings dating back to the 1830s which marked the pre–Civil War South. The main act of lynching included hanging from trees. Within acts of lynching, African Americans were specifically targeted by whites. There were four main steps of lynching consisting of an accusation by a white person or group, an arrest by police, an assembly of a white mob, and finally a murder.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lynching of Andrew Richards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.