Lynching is a term with a broad definition beyond the familiar use of hanging in the Old West. It describes an extralegal mob execution in which a victim has been accused of charges and no effort is made to prove the charges or to provide a jury trial.

The method of the killing doesn't matter.

Lynchings are responses to crimes "so heinous that they must be killed quickly and publicly," says author Dominic Capeci Jr.

In the United States, lynchings largely have been used by white society to maintain social control, Capeci says, "to keep black people in their place."

In his book "The Lynching of Cleo Wright," Capeci calls the young black man's lynching a "ceremony of exorcism" that occurred due to his two violations of race rule: He attacked both a white woman and a symbol of white authority.

There were 85 lynchings in Missouri between 1889 and 1942, according to Capeci's research. William Henderson was lynched in 1896 in Cape Girardeau County. Many more occurred in Pemiscot and Stoddard counties.

The number across the South since the 1800s totals more than 4,000.

The numbers have been declining steadily since 1900 and especially since World War II, but lynchings resurfaced again during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The black man who was dragged to his death behind a vehicle earlier this year in Jasper, Texas, might not have been a victim of lynching in the strict sense. It was not committed by a mob, not done in public and the man had not committed any offense.

"But the racism that underlies it is a link," Capeci says. "Black people would say it is more of the same, just packaged differently.

Many whites would say it was not a lynching, that old-fashioned lynchings are gone, Capeci said.

"At some point it becomes academic."