Many on social media are calling these deaths “lynchings,” a term which was absent for much of the discourse around police killings of Black people that dominated the news cycle in 2014 and beyond. Lynching is a term used to describe a murder by a mob (usually defined as three or more people) with no due process. According to The Legacy Museum , home of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice , which memorializes Black victims of lynching in the U.S., more than 4,400 African-Americans were killed — and often tortured — by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. In over 99 percent of those cases, the perpetrators were never held accountable.