Heres a look at how lynching evolved in the U.S. as populations of color grew and demanded civil rights:BEGINNINGSAlmost as soon as European settlers came to the present-day United States, white mobs attacked peaceful Native American villages. Two years later, a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln denounced McIntoshs lynching and called it a threat to the Republic. In 1866, a dispute between white and black Civil War ex-soldiers in Memphis, Tennessee, resulted in blacks lynchings by white mobs and police. States in the former Confederacy passed laws preventing black men from voting and used the threat of lynching to halt objections. In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based legal advocacy group, opened the nations first memorial and museum to lynching victims.