The Strange Career of Judge Lynch: How White Newspapers Covered Lynching in the United States 1880–1950

We provide a nuanced quantitative description of the historic evolution of lynching frames in two major White newspapers. We analyze all articles mentioning lynching in the New York Times and Atlanta Constitution from 1880 to 1950. We use keyword-assisted topic modeling, an automated document clustering method, to analyze the frames these papers used when discussing lynching. We document the dominance of a Rough Justice frame, which framed lynching as a legitimate community response to crime through the 1880s and early 1890s and its slow decline thereafter. Due Process and Civilization frames, which framed lynching as illegal or uncivilized respectively, began to rise in the 1890s. Finally, a Civil Rights frame, which gave more voice to Black organizations (e.g., the NAACP), began to rise in the 1920s in the New York Times. Results suggest that lynching frames were more varied and changed more gradually than typically assumed in the lynching and framing literature.