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= Underground lynching = Underground lynching is a form of lynching practiced against African Americans where the perpetrators murder their victims without a community’s support or knowledge. As opposed to the public spectacle of lynching, which could draw entire communities, it was normally carried out by small groups of men who secretively murdered victims and disposed of their corpses, all while attempting to hide their actions from the public. Practiced largely in rural areas of the Midwest and South from the 1930s through the 1960s, it was largely carried out at a time when the spectacle lynching of African Americans was beginning to lose its legitimacy and support from the larger white public. As underground lynching mounted in the 1930s and 1940s, the NAACP confronted it in 1940, defining the concept in a pamphlet entitled "Lynching Goes Underground," while bringing attention to cases that fit into this category. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, underground lynching increasingly gained notoriety as a concept with the infamous murders of Emmett Till in 1955 and in the Freedom Summer Murders of 1964 that killed three civil rights activists. Today, the plausibility of underground lynching cases remain a factor in recent deaths of Black victims ruled as suicides, or in cases where victims have gone missing. The Equal Justice Initiative is attempting to identify these victims, tell their stories, and memorialize them at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Midwest and South
Compared to spectacle lynching, which was practiced in public areas like towns and cities, underground lynching was normally carried out in rural areas. In the Midwest, spectacle lynching lost its legitimacy after the infamous lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith caused nationwide negative publicity. Afterwards, authorities in Midwestern cities subdued racist mob violence while still using their authority to abuse Blacks in urban areas. Generally, the perpetrators of underground lynching targeted outsiders who were not from the area. When and if underground lynchings were exposed, white communities often tried to justify them on the grounds of sexual assault or harassment towards white women. Though lynching had lost legitimacy, whites in both the Midwest and South often escaped justice for their actions when it did take place. In at least three cases that took place in the Midwest between 1932 and 1943, newspapers in the region condoned underground lynching on the basis that the victims had not adhered to racial etiquette in predominantly rural white communities. Such instances of violence were far from uncommon in the Midwest. In Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois alone, there were at least eighty-nine African Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950.

In a way similar to the Midwest, spectacle lynching declined in the South as the result of unpopular public opinion. As historian Phillip Dray observes, foreign opinion and the refinement of international law after World War II led to the demise of spectacle lynching in the South. Between 1940 and 1944, the number of recorded lynchings in the South decreased from five to two. Whites in the South, continued to cover their actions and strike fear into Blacks through underground lynching, many of which went unrecorded. The killing of Emmett Till in 1955 and the 1964 Freedom Summer murders that claimed the lives of three victims were only two of the most infamous cases of underground lynching that gained national and international publicity.

NAACP advocacy
By the early 1940s, the NAACP was taking a firm stance against underground lynching cases. Reporting on the issue in a 1940 pamphlet entitled "Lynching Goes Underground," the organization argued that "countless" Black victims were stealthily killed each year by white racist men. The pamphlet also brought attention to two lynchings in Mississippi--those of Joe Rodgers, who was quietly murdered over a paycheck discrepancy, and Claude Banks, who was scapegoated and shot dead after someone else assaulted a white man. Neither case had been covered by small-town newspapers and local officials. During that time, the NAACP also began working collaboratively with the Justice Department to uncover lynching cases that had gone unprosecuted. The NAACP also collaborated with other Black activist organizations and forced Ohio officials to hold a trial for white men who secretly lynched a Southern Black migrant worker named Luke Murray in 1932. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the NAACP also worked with the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and International Labor Defense on determining what constituted a lynching.

Plausible recent cases
According to a 2020 Washington post article, police officers ruled that the deaths of four Black people in California, Texas, and New York were suicides by hanging. Given that hanging is considered an uncommon method of suicide among Black people and the historical context of lynching that occurred secretively, the instances have raised questions among the Black community on what actually took place.