Welcome to the Lynching Violence Website. This website is an information resource for people interested in the history of racial violence in the American South. We believe that it is important not to gloss over that terrible era in American history, nor to forget the thousands of people who were its victims. It is for that purpose that we make this information freely and publicly available.
Whether you are an educator, a researcher, an activist, an historian, a surviving descendant, or a student, we hope that you find useful information here. You can use this website to:
- search for and access our research notes for individual cases where a person was lynched, or was threatened with lynching but not actually killed.
- register to use our data files. Once you are registered, you can download batches of “case files” with our research notes on each case, and spreadsheets (saved in .csv format, which you can open in many programs like Excel) that will allow you to quantitatively analyze the data.
- learn more about the research projects that constructed these data, and the people who helped to put them together.
- find resources to organize a memorial reading of the names of lynch victims in your own community.
- download tables with the statistical analyses presented in the book Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence.
The information and data on this website will be regularly updated. Register here to be sure you receive updates of new data and features as they are added.