Subscribe

* indicates required
Okayplayer News

To continue reading

Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Interactive Map Shows US Lynchings That Occurred Between 1830s & 1960s
Interactive Map Shows US Lynchings That Occurred Between 1830s & 1960s

Interactive Map Shows US Lynchings That Occurred Between 1830s & 1960s

Interactive Map Shows US Lynchings That Occurred Between 1830s & 1960s

An online interactive map allows its users to see where lynchings in the United States have occurred.

The Monroe Work Today research group has compiled information from nearly every documented lynching in the U.S. between the 1830s and 1960s, to create an interactive map where users can learn more about where most of the attacks occurred, as well as information about the victims.

Depending on where you scroll on the map, hundreds upon thousands of victims are shown as various dots across the country. The majority of the map is made up of African American lynchings, but other races (particularly Mexican and Chinese) are also prominent.

What is truly fascinating is reading up the different accounts on why the victim was lynched. For example, one white male by the name of William Pierce Mabry, was lynched in April 1885, after he defended a black woman from a beating. Another example shows a cluster of Italian men that were lynched in New Orleans in March 1891, after a white mob stormed the New Orleans Parish and shot the Sicilian inmates inside, over a controversial trial that found nine Sicilian men acquitted in the murder of a police chief.

"Before this website, it was impossible to search the web and find an accurate scope of the history of American lynching," the Monroe Work Today website states. "...This site leaves the record open for all Americans, especially high school students who want to learn more than what their textbook has to say."

The website is named in honor of Monroe Nathan Work, a sociologist who spent decades gathering statistics on lynchings.

In related news, The Northeastern University School of Law in Boston is housing the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which was created in 2007 to make an archive of documents, photographs, news clippings and interviews about as many lynching related deaths as possible.

The project is described as a semester long “clinic,” in which each student is given a half dozen list of murdered black people, with information on each person varying (one example, according to the ABA Journal, is a victim whose only information includes a newspaper headline of their death, with it reading “unknown Negro found in swamp”).