The mob murder of black Americans (who were the major victims of “lynch law” from the 1880s to the 1950s) became increasingly violent in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Black poets frequently called the nation’s attention to the violence, to the lack of justice, and to the contradiction between, for example, black military service and constitutional rights and black men burned to death in front of white mobs of thousands. African Americans who were executed (by the state or by mobs) after being convicted by the legal system (controlled by whites and which sought only guilt, not justice) were victims of “legal lynching.”