Lynching is the occurrence of extrajudicial killings that began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and had mostly ended by time of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, although instances occurred as late as 1981 or 1998, depending on categorization. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary victims of lynchings by white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, where the majority of African Americans lived, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and the border states of the Southwest, where Mexicans were often the victims of lynchings.