Having done more than a little deep reading on the topic...
The tradition of lynching was a way for southern Democrats to get around Radical Republican courts which would hold the line on burden of proof (or sometimes artificially inflate it) in a sort of 19th-century affirmative action.
Most lynching was basically extrajudicial community justice.
However, as with any such movement, the most enthusiastic participants were often in it for the crusade rather than the community. The class-and-race warriors who were happy to execute blacks on a rumor because it gave access to property and helped bust up community solidarity after the Republicans lost power in the south in the late 19th century.
There was a protracted race war in the south from the 1860s through the 1960s, financed by the Federal government backing first one side, then another, in the interest of keeping the South from re-emerging as a viable power block against the Yankee victory in the civil war. The legacy of this among lower-class blacks across the country is the closed, unthinking, tribal, and violent attitudes you see on display in the Karamelo issue and its post-trial scream-fest.
The problem was really never the "whites" or the "blacks," -- blacks and whites were both pawns in a power game being played several levels higher, and the facts on the ground have always been much more complicated and less flattering to partisan vanities than anyone involved can afford to admit.
Now, of course, we get to live in the aftermath of that century-long color revolution conducted on our own soil by our own government, and there's no really good solve for all the problems that were created in the meantime.