Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia is an ongoing research project examining one of the darkest, yet almost forgotten, pages of American history: the lynching of thousands of people in the US South. In particular, this website focuses on telling the stories of all the known lynching victims who were killed in Virginia between 1866 and 1932, most of them African American men. Even though a small number of the victims of mob violence were white, lynching was essentially a form of state-sanctioned terrorism against African Americans – almost none of the lynchers ever faced trial, and even fewer were convicted for their crimes. Lynching was indeed a key institution in the preservation of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.
This site tells the stories of the people who were lynched, stories that have very often been erased from local histories and collective memories (you can start reading them here). Racial Terror also stores more than 900 historical newspaper articles describing lynching events in Virginia and 300 pages of archival records related to those acts of lethal mob violence. These media and archival sources are fully searchable and available for students, researchers and the public to read and use for their own research. A map of Virginia is also provided to display where each lynching occurred.
As this project is a work in progress, the website is periodically updated with information about events, new sources, tools to explore the database, as well as in-depth investigations of single lynchings and analysis of geographical, temporal and sociological patterns of racial violence in Virginia.