Thousands of black men, of which, probably the great majority of such, were innocent of whatever dubious offense that they were alleged to have perpetrated, were lynched after the conclusion of the civil war and the years thereafter, till such eventually fell out of favor to a more "civilized" nation, by the 1950s until the present age. While one might think that the purpose of a given lynching, was to bring "mob justice" to a miscreant; in fact, the real purpose of lynching was not so much that, or even to allegedly protect the virtue of the white southern woman, but mainly such was done by those that were no respecters of the law, with the main objective of this primitive act being to thoroughly terrorize and to intimidate black people of that local community.
After all, in recognition that though the white man in many southern communities represented all of the money, all of the justice, and all of the guns in that community, they were still in total, often physically outnumbered by those blacks so freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and hence these blacks, now free, were no longer enslaved to the white man. Further to the point, the white man was never going to easily tolerate the black man having any sort of equal standing with them, no matter what the federal law so said, and thereupon southern white men were inclined to find any sort of pretense whatsoever, to keep the black man in their place, by arbitrarily abusing them and then publically hanging them. So too, it was important to those white men effecting that extrajudicial justice, that the black man be publically humiliated so as to send a clear and unequivocal message to all those blacks that were part of that community, that the white man was, judge, jury, and the literal executioner of them.
The era of lynching was not an era in which the white man had to shy away from what and who he really was, but rather was an opportunity instead, to prove that though the white southern man, may have lost the war, he had not lost the power to keep those that were formerly his slaves, effectively, under his oppressive thumb, of which, all those blacks that played by the white man's rules, by thereby paying obeisance to that white man at all times and under all circumstances, along with subservient blacks not complaining about being cheated by that white man, were typically permitted to have their place, especially if they were able to contribute to the powers-to-be of that community by their labor; whereas, those "uppity" blacks, or those that were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, suffered the most undignified and the most unjust of deaths.
The full purpose of these public lynching's, was to send a clear message not just to the blacks of the community, that their literal life and death was in the hands of these extrajudicial domestic terrorists, but also to send a message to the whites of that community, that they too must fall in line, and thereby forsake any sort of progressive or liberal thinking, for the only law that really matter back then was that which was practiced by those that brokered no dissent from that of which they did with impunity.