Most Americans are familiar with the brutal history of lynching, the mob violence that killed more than 4,000 Black people across the United States. But when we think about racial terror, we often think about the South. This new research initiative is dedicated to unearthing and documenting a history that remains largely unexplored and untold: The story of lynchings in the North.

Between 1877 and 1950, scores of African Americans were lynched in northern and mid-Atlantic states. In New York. New Jersey. Maryland. Pennsylvania. Delaware. Ohio. Illinois. Kansas. Nebraska. Minnesota. North Dakota. For more than half a century, their stories have remained largely unknown.

The Hidden Legacies project at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute is compiling archival records about the Black men and women who were killed and the white mobs who killed them. Our journalism students are researching the lives of the victims and telling their stories to help our nation better understand how families and communities today are grappling with the legacy of this racial violence.

About

I was born and raised in New York City and I’ve been a journalist for The New York Times for nearly three decades. But it wasn’t until 2018 that I learned that a Black man had been lynched in my home state. I was astonished. Lynchings in the North? It turns out that more than 300 Black Americans were lynched in the Northeast and across the Midwest between 1880 and 1940, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. I needed to know more. So I got in my car and drove 65 miles to Port Jervis, New York to find out about the killing of a man named Robert Lewis. This project, Lynchings in the North, has its roots in that road trip.