On Oct. 16, 1916, in Paducah, Kentucky, a 6,000-person mob “quietly” lynched a Black man and a boy accused of assault, according to a newspaper in Prescott, Arizona. The paper’s depiction of an orderly lynch mob contrasts with the facts: the victims were riddled with bullets and their corpses were burned in a blazing pile of brush.

The portrayal of the lynch mob as orderly was not unusual in newspaper coverage in the 1800s and early 1900s. A Howard Center for Investigative Journalism review showed while lynch mobs generally were portrayed as hostile, dozens of news accounts across the country also described this violent lawlessness as an act of justice carried out by orderly groups of people.

Lynching, as defined by the NAACP, is “the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process.” Lynching soared after the Civil War as a method to suppress Black people from exercising their newly granted constitutional rights and to intimidate them.

During Reconstruction, racial tensions brimmed and some white newspapers fought to protect a white supremacist hierarchy integral to the foundation of the American South, according to historians Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield.

Lynch mobs were described as orderly nearly one in five times in a sample of newspaper coverage in the 1880s, a decade of escalating violence against African Americans, the Howard Center review showed. In other decades, the orderly mob narrative was present in 4% to 8% of the samples reviewed.

For example, a mob “quietly dispersed,” and was made up of the “best citizens” of the town, said one 1893 article from Savannah, Georgia. The story includes evidence of extreme violence: the mob of 600 hung their victim from a tree.

Another important finding: news coverage tended to describe the mob in a neutral fashion after the Civil War until the 1890s. Neutral mob portrayals accounted for more than 55% of mob narratives examined in the newspaper sample  during the 1880s.

Examples of neutral depictions include passive language to skim over violence. Victims were “taken from the jail … and lynched,”  a news brief reported, with no further information on the lynching. Variations of this phrase also appeared in stories that included detailed descriptions of violence.

The Howard Center identified 60,000 pages of lynching news coverage from 1789 to 1963 in the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper database. This research was built on a sample of 7,162 articles, including 1,045 articles from  Black-owned  newspapers.

Student researchers classified the newspaper’s portrayal of the mob in three major categories: hostile, neutral and orderly, and then sought to see if the news account described the lynching as a form of justice. The categories could overlap since some articles portrayed the mob as orderly and said they performed justice. Categorized articles then were analyzed across regions and decades.

Some papers equated lynching as a form of justice. “Negro Murderer Lynched,” said a 1905 headline in the Los Angeles Herald. “Jury Disagrees and Kentucky Mob Takes The Case Into Its Own Hands.”

Other historians observed similar patterns of news coverage of lynch mobs. In the 1890s, sensationalism was on the rise in lynching coverage with an emphasis on “pain and terror,” noted W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Researchers have pointed out newspapers’ tendency to provide graphic depictions and portray mobs as orderly and upstanding. Papers also tended to print news briefs instead of more detailed stories before the 1890s, Brundage observed.

The Howard Center study builds on the work of Brundage, sociologist Charles Seguin of Pennsylvania State University and others since it is among the first study to examine lynching news narratives over time and across regions.

In the 1830s, over half of lynch mob portrayals equated the mob’s actions with justice, the Howard Center found. The justice narrative was in more than a quarter of all phrases examined in the 1840s, 1860s and 1870s in the sampled articles. By the 1880s, newspapers’ justification of mob violence decreased to about 20%, and was cut in half  over the next 40 years.

From the 1880s through the 1920s, the mob was most often characterized as hostile: news stories used words like “angry,” “excitement” or “infuriated” to describe the mob and included graphic depictions of violence. “Riddled with bullets” was a common phrase, and papers also described mobs that “stormed” the jail and “overpowered” law enforcement officers. Hostile portrayals reached their height at 57.9% of phrases examined in the 1940s. From the 1880s to the 1920s, hostile portrayals ranged from 41.1% to 48.3% of two-word phrases in news coverage.

Examining newspapers by region, the Howard Center found the lynching as justice narrative was least likely in Northeastern newspapers but about the same in newspapers in the South, Midwest and West. Often newspapers outside of the South would publish lynching news based on wire service reports or other content sharing agreements.

Characterizations of the mob overlapped in some instances. “Hostile” and “justice” went together the most, co-occurring 5.6% of the time, or 180 times. In these instances, these mobs were both unruly in nature and described as performing justified actions. “Justice” and “neutral” occurred together 2% of the time, or 65 times, and “hostile” and “neutral” co-occurred 1.3% of the time, or 43 times.