A Black Man Was Found Hanging From a Tree--Residents Don't Buy That It Was a Suicide.

[Igel]

16. Hanging.

You can lynch somebody with rocks.

Hanging is prototypical, but not required.

Lynching is killing by a mob that seeks to enforce their extrajudicial assumptions of guilt. It's assumed that the man at the root of the Tulsa riots would have been lynched if the police hadn't defended him against the mob (and smuggle him out of town), for instance. His guilt was presumed, there was a mob demanding justice, and the only thing that was missing from a lynching was the mob's killing the poor guy.

Lynching is, at its heart, a denial of due process fueled by a crowd demanding justice entirely on its terms. The mob demands (its) justice so it hears the accusation, assigns guilt, prescribes the sentence, and then carries it out. Laws? Mob rule.

The earliest lynchings were extrajudicial punishments, but not killing. A mob catches the allegedly guilty person, denies due process, and punishes him by tar and feathering him or burning down his house? That would have been a lynching early in the word's history. Obligatory death came decades later.