However, two scenarios could arise in which these lines got blurred: 1. One, when a person was picked randomly —s/he was just the closest victim the mob could find— and murdered without the pretext of serving justice for the town.

2. A second scenario involved violence on a large-scale, when seething tensions exploded against an entire ethnic group. (Often this was over scarce jobs.) Those perpetrators did not claim to be agents of justice. They knew it was murder—in their rage, they didn’t care. This was a homicidal spree to avenge the established order: as the ‘superior race’, shouldn’t whites keep all the advantages for themselves? The victims of their wrath also died viciously. Some were hanged in mere minutes, dismembered, or shot up til their bodies were mutilated.

It turns out, this scenario was more prevalent in Northern cities. If you decide not to count this kind of mob, it removes most of the victims on the North half of the map. Newspapers all over the South hammered that point. [See quotes]

In 2012, author Ashraf Rushdy raised the same question about semantics in his book American Lynching:

"What does it mean, then, when what looks by all accounts like a traditional lynching is discounted because it occurred in an urban space during a spree of mob violence...?"