Racial terrorism was common during the Jim Crow period after Reconstruction in the South. It was publicly displayed through lynching, even though the daily practice of racial domination, though violence was common from 1865 to 1960.
There are varying reports of the total number of lynchings, but lynchings are the best representation of the racial terrorism in the South and the economic power of white supremacy during the Jim Crow era. Each of the lynching stories are devastating, heartfelt, and real. You have to read a couple of individual accounts to understand the pain and injustice of the time.
The best source is the original Tuskegee data and the Equal Justice Initiative study. Our dataset utilizes the Tuskegee data.
Black Economics Lynching Data Set. (incomplete)
The best, most comprehensive source on Lynching in the United States is Wikipedia — Lynchings in America . Wikipedia uses Tuskegee data and covers lynching in depth and related topics. They also have included many photos.
We want to introduce our Black Lynching dataset for high school and college students. We ask you to create an Excel graph with the data comparing Black and White lynchings. Then answer the questions below.
Your task is to use the data from the spreadsheet to create a graph of lynching in the United States between 1885 and 1960.
Why is there a sharp gap between white and Black lynching data starting in 1910 ?
What was the impact of Emmett Till’s murder? What role did Till’s mother play? What role did the media play at the time?
The EJI also has a lesson plan for teaching about lynching and racial terrorism.
Ida B Wells
Ida B Wells was an anti-lynching advocate during the 1890s to 1930.
Emmett Till
Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 and widespread coverage by the media, were one of the pivotal moments in the campaign to end racial terrorism in the US.
In 1964, the murders of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner marked the end of systemic and state-sanctioned racial terrorism in the US. The Federal government and the FBI investigate the case. In 2005, two men were convicted of the murders.
And finally, the Congress passed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in March, 2022 codifying lynching as a crime in the US
Sources
Tuskegee Institute – the oldest and best. Not fully sourced by today’s standards.
Negro Yearbook 1913– has great data from 1885 to 1913 that closely matches the Tuskegee data. I suspect the source is the same, but I could not verify.
Tolnay and Beck: A Festival of Violence, An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (2015) – Analyzed news reports in southern states. Their dataset is smaller than many other reports but fully sourced. 2800 lynchings in Southern states.
Equal Justice Institute – The report documents 4084 lynchings in the South and North. Fully sourced at the county level. However, they go country by country (EJI Report) without national statistics.
Lynchings in America – Wikipedia. The absolute best research on lynchings in the United States. Uses Tuskegee data.
Seguin and Rigby, National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941, (Sage Journals), 2019 – Scholars take another look at the data using newspaper archives using the internet and digitized data. A short overview is here.
v3