These data extend existing data on lynching victims to cover the 48 contiguous United States from 1883 to 1941. The data here cover 38 states not included in Tolney and Beck's (1995) original data, as well as 3 additional victims in the 10 states covered by Tolney and Beck. The authors confirmed 1,319 victims from previous data and found 15 additional victims not recorded in any prior data set.

Lynching in the United States is estimated to have claimed over 4.7 thousand lives between 1882 and 1968, and just under 3.5 thousand of these victims were black. Today, lynching is more commonly associated with racial oppression, particularly in the south, however, in early years, victims were more commonly white (specifically Mexican), and lynchings were more frequent in western territories and along the southern border. It was only after Reconstruction's end where the lynching of black people became more prevalent, and was arguably the most violent tool of oppression used by white supremacists. Nationwide, the share of the population who was black fluctuated between 10 and 13 percent in the years shown here, however the share of lynching victims who were black was almost 73 percent. North-south divide Of the 4.7 thousand victims of lynching between 1882 and 1968, over 3.5 thousand of these were killed in former-Confederate states. Of the fourteen states where the highest number of lynching victims were killed, eleven were former-Confederate states, and all saw the deaths of at least one hundred people due to lynching. Mississippi was the state where most people were lynched in these years, with an estimated 581 victims, 93 percent of whom were black. Georgia saw the second most lynchings, with 531 in total, and the share of black victims was also 93 percent. Compared to the nationwide average of 73 percent, the share of black victims in former-Confederate states was 86 percent. Texas was the only former-Confederate state where this share (71 percent) was below the national average, due to the large number of Mexicans who were lynched there. Outside of the south Of the non-Confederate state with the highest number of lynching victims, most either bordered the former-Confederate states, or were to the west. Generally speaking, the share of white victims in these states was often higher than in the south, meaning that the majority took place in the earlier years represented here; something often attributed to the lack of an established judiciary system in rural regions, and the demand for a speedy resolution. However, there are many reports of black people being lynched in the former border states in the early-20th century, as they made their way northward during the Great Migration. Between 1882 and 1968, lynchings were rare in the Northeast, although Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island were the only states** without any recorded lynchings in these years.

We merge the longitudinally linked historical U.S. Census records with data on lynchings of Hispanics in Texas to investigate the impacts of historical lynchings of ethnic Mexicans in Texas on U.S.-born Mexicans Americans. Using variation in lynching incidents across counties over time, we explore the impacts of local exposure to lynchings during childhood on long-run outcomes such as earnings, education, and home ownership of adults in 1940. Our findings are suggestive of small, negative impacts, but we caution that more research in this area is needed for a more robust interpretation of the results.

Context:

"Lynching" historically includes not only Southern lynching but frontier lynching and vigilantism nationwide and many labor-related incidents. Persons of any race or ethnicity and either gender may have been either perpetrators or victims of lynching. The lynchings in this dataset follow an NAACP definition for including an incident in the inventory of lynchings:

1. There must be evidence that someone was killed;
2. The killing must have occurred illegally;
3. Three or more persons must have taken part in the killing; and
4. The killers must have claimed to be serving justice or tradition.

Content:

The original data came from the NAACP Lynching Records at Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama. Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck examined these records for name and event duplications and other errors with funding from a National Science Foundation Grant and made their findings available to Project HAL in 1998. Project HAL is inactive now, but it’s original purpose was to build a data set for researchers to use and to add to.

The dataset contains the following information for each of the 2806 reported lynchings:

• State: State where the lynching took place
• Year: Year of the lynching
• Mo: Month
• Day: Day
• Victim: Name of the victim
• County: County where the lynching occurred (keep in mind that county names have changed & boundaries redrawn)
• Race: Race of the victim
• Sex: Sex of the victim
• Mob: Information on the mob
• Offense: Victim’s alleged offense
• Note: Note (if any)
• 2nd Name: Name of the 2nd victim (if any)
• 3rd Name: Name of the 3rd victim (if any)
• Comments: Comments (if any)
• Source: Source of the information (if any)

Acknowledgements:

This dataset was compiled by Dr. Elizabeth Hines and Dr. Eliza Steelwater. If you use this dataset in your work, please include the following citation:

Hines, E., & Steelwater, E. (2006). Project Hal: Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project. University of North Carolina, http://people.uncw.edu/hinese/HAL/HAL%20Web%20Page.htm

You may also like:

• Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, EJI posts lynching information and stories and is currently quite active: https://www.eji.org/
• First Person Narratives of the American South: Personal accounts of Southern life between 1860 and 1920

Inspiration:

• Can you use the county-level data in this dataset to create a map of lynchings in the US?
• What demographic qualities were most associated with lynching victims?
• How did patterns of lynching change over time?

Tidied data from the Chicago Tribune, 1895. Ida B. Wells' The Red Record. Data on lynchings in 1895 as reported on by the Chicago Tribune and discussed in The Red Record (Wells 1895). Latitude/Longitude added for mapping sites of lynchings.

This file contains the data replication files for Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks. This paper analyzes the extent to which the political participation of blacks can be traced to historical lynchings that took place from1882 to 1930. Using county-level voter registration data, I show that blacks who reside in southern counties that experienced a relatively higher number of historical lynchings have lower voter registration rates today. This relationship holds after accounting for a variety of historical and contemporary characteristics of counties. There exists evidence of the persistence of cultural voting norms among blacks yet this relationship does not exist for whites.

Why do people support extrajudicial violence? In two survey experiments with respondents in Brazil, we examine which characteristics of lynching scenarios garner greater support for lynching and whether providing different types of information about lynching reduces support for it. We find that people often do support community members to take vengeance. In particular, our analysis finds that people strongly support the use of extrajudicial violence by families of victims against men who sexually assault and murder women and children. We also find that criminal punishment and the threat of vendettas reduce support, but appeals to the human rights of victims have zero effect on support for lynchings. Unlike the U.S. experience with lynchings, race was not observed to play an important role in how respondents answered the survey.

Lynching remains a common form of collective punishment for alleged wrongdoers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia today. Unlike other kinds of collective violence, lynching is usually not carried out by standing organizations. How do lynch mobs overcome the high barriers to violent collective action? I argue that they draw on local community ties to compensate for a lack of centralized organization. Lynch mobs benefit from solidarity and peer pressure, which facilitate collective action. The study focuses on Mexico, where lynching is prevalent and often amounts to the collective beating of thieves. Based on original survey data from Mexico City and a novel lynching event dataset covering the whole of Mexico, I find that individuals with more ties in their communities participate more often in lynching, and municipalities with more highly integrated communities have higher lynching rates. As community ties and lynching may be endogenously related, I also examine the posited mechanisms and the causal direction. Findings reveal that municipalities exposed to a recent major earthquake – an event that increases community ties – subsequently experienced increased levels of lynching. Importantly, I find that interpersonal trust is unrelated to lynching, thus showing that different aspects of social capital have diverging consequences for collective violence, with community ties revealing a “dark side.”

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Abstract The present study aimed to develop and validate the Scale of Attitudes towards Lynching (Escala de Atitudes frente ao Linchamento - EAL). For this purpose, 2 studies were conducted. Study 1 aimed to test the measure’s structure-based validity and internal consistency and included 428 undergraduate and graduate students from the 5 Brazilian regions, with a mean age of 26.86 (SD =7.92). The results of the first study showed adequate psychometric indexes, indicating the bifactorial structure of the construct: crimes against property (α = 0.97) and heinous crimes (α = 0.97). Study 2 aimed to test the replicability of the bifactorial structure obtained in study 1 and included 481 college students from all Brazilian regions with an average age of 27.47 (SD = 9.23). The results supported the adequacy of the bifactorial solution (GFI = 92, CFI = 97, TLI = 97, RMSEA = 0.08). Overall, the EAL presented satisfactory psychometric characteristics that can support future studies.

How do moral beliefs influence favorability to collective violence? In this article, I argue that, first, moral beliefs are influential depending on their salience, as harm avoidance is a common moral concern. The more accessible moral beliefs in decision-making, the more they restrain harmful behavior. Second, moral beliefs are influential depending on their content. Group-oriented moral beliefs can overturn the harm avoidance principle and motivate individuals to favor collective violence. Analysis is based on a representative survey in Mexico City and focuses on a proximate form of collective violence, locally called lynching. Findings support both logics of moral influence. Experimentally induced moral salience reduces favorability to lynching, and group-oriented moral beliefs are related to more favorability. Against existing theories that downplay the relevance of morality and present it as cheap talk, these findings demonstrate how moral beliefs can both restrain and motivate collective violence.

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Derek H. Alderman, Joshua F.J. Inwood, Ethan BottoneThe mapping behind the movement: On recovering the critical cartographies of the African American Freedom Struggle,Geoforum,Volume 120,2021,Pages 67-78,ISSN 0016-7185,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.01.022.(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718521000300)Abstract: Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartographies stretch what constitutes a map, the political work performed by maps, and the practices, spaces, and political-affective dimensions of mapping. We offer an extended illustration of the conventional and unconventional mapping behind USA anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighting the knowledge production practices of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute’s Monroe Work, and the embodied counter-mapping of journalist/activist Ida B. Wells. Recognizing that civil rights struggles are long, always unfolding, and relationally tied over time and space, we link this look from the past to contemporary, ongoing resistant cartographical practices as scholars/activists continue to challenge racialized violence and advance transitional justice, including the noted memory-work of the Equal Justice Initiative. An understanding of African American traditions of counter-mapping is about more than simply inserting the Black experience into our dominant ideas about cartography or even resistant mapping. Black geographies has much to teach cartography and geographers about what people of color engaged in antiracist struggles define as geographic knowledge and mapping practices on their own terms—hopefully provoking a broader and more inclusive definition of the discipline itself.Keywords: African American; Anti-lynching; Black geographies; Civil rights; Counter-mapping; Critical cartography

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