The aim of this article is to clarify the definition of lynching, as despite a century of victims a univocal consensuson how we can define this practice today has not been reached yet in the US. This lexical semantics problem affected thousands of African Americans by losingtheir lives on the American soil, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, due to the lack of a commonly shared legal definition of lynching, many appeals to justice failed. This linguistic issue is still the subject of a controversial socio-cultural debate,as in the absence of a collective definition, the practice continues not being considered as a federal crime today. By exploring the definitions of "lynching"proposed over the years,including the courtrooms, this article aims at understanding whether the racial component is also applicable to foreign cases, orwhether it may well be a peculiarity of the United States, possibly of colonial derivation.
Key words: Lynching, racial violence, Jesse Washington, Lynch law, lynchamento
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