Guest (or, at least, one of the guests) said at one point:

"Because of the powerful association in the US of lynching with racial lynching..."

I think he/she is really saying that this is a "powerful association" **about** the US, and strongly suspect that the person who first made the knee-jerk assumption that began this thread is someone from outside the US. In America, most people realize that homemade law enforcement in the Old West, while distasteful and essentially arbitary, had little or nothing to do with white-vs-black racism. Immigants, Mexicans and Native Americans may indeed have been over-represented among the victims for racial reasons, but there were (and still are) very limited numbers of African Americans represented in the local population.