Texas
Texas stands third among the states, after Mississippi and Georgia, in the total number of lynching victims. Of the 493 victims in Texas between 1882 and 1968, 352 were black and 141 were white. A report by the Texas State Historical Association said that between 1889 and 1942, charges of murder or attempted murder precipitated at least 40 percent of the mobs while rape or attempted rape accounted for 26 percent. African Americans were more likely to be lynched for rape than were members of other groups. Meanwhile, war-generated tensions led to the greatest mass lynching in the history of the state, the Great Hanging at Gainesville, when vigilantes hanged 41 suspected Unionists in October 1862. In 1916, Jesse Washington, a black teenage farmhand was lynched in the county seat of Waco, Texas, in what became a well-known example of racially motivated lynching. Washington was convicted of raping and murdering the wife of his white employer in rural Robinson, Texas.
