A new report has tallied almost 4,000 lynchings of black people in the South during the Jim Crow era, about 700 more than were part of previous tallies of Southern lynchings.
The report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal counsel to the poor, calculates that there were 3,959 lynchings in the South from the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 to 1950. The EJI report focuses specifically on what the group calls “racial terror lynchings.” The victims were killed often because they had committed some type of social transgression (like bumping into a white woman) or because they were accused of a crime. In cases involving criminal accusations, lynching victims were not given the due process of a trial. The perpetrators of these lynchings were not charged with crimes for the killings.
Georgia had the most lynchings during the period studied, with 586. Mississippi had the second-most, with 576 killings ,and Louisiana was third with 540. Florida had the highest rate of lynchings per capita, with 0.594 black residents being lynched annually per 100,000.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the EJI, is now on a campaign to get more communities to erect markers or memorials at locations where lynchings occurred. Most lynching sites are not publicly acknowledged.
- The Case for Mediocrity
- How Russia Is Recruiting Cubans to Fight in Ukraine
- Paul Hollywood Answers All of Your Questions About The Great British Baking Show
- Meet the 2023 TIME100 Next: the Emerging Leaders Shaping the World
- Oprah and Arthur C. Brooks: How to Separate Work From Your Identity
- How Canada and India's Relationship Crumbled
- You Don’t Have to Like Wrestling to Love Netflix’s Excellent Wrestlers
- The Most Anticipated Books, Movies, TV, and Music of Fall 2023
- Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time