History, Events And Facts

Data gathered by the Equal Justice Initiative between the 1870s and 1950s reveals that the number is much higher than had been previously reported. The Equal Justice Initiative  released  a study Tuesday highlighting documented lynchings of African Americans at the hands of white southerners. The first anti-lynching bill was passed in 1922, but the racial violence continued long after that. Lint Shaw was taken from jail in Royston, Georgia, on April 28, 1936, and lynched a short time before he was to have gone on trial for reportedly attacking a white girl. The report reveals that between 1877 and 1950, 3,959 African Americans were lynched — 700 more incidents than had ever been calculated before, the Equality Justice Initiative (EJI) found. Researchers looked specifically at the "most active lynching states": Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The Alabama-based o...