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The unlawful killing of a person or persons by parties unknown, lynching reputedly had its origins in the American Revolution when Charles Lynch of Bedford County, Virginia, formed a vigilante association to rid the region of Tories, or British sympathizers. For much of the nineteenth century it was seen as a form of rough justice meted out to outlaws in frontier communities in the absence of effective legal authorities. Between 1889 and 1918 at least 3,224 people were killed by lynch mobs in the United States; 2,522 were black and 702 white.