Mob Violence, Riots and Pogroms against African American Communities (1824-1974)
About this Project
We have sought to collate a comprehensive record of white mob violence that collectively punished African American communities across the United States. While the thousands of lynchings that occurred were also a form of racial terrorism against the African American community we have generally excluded them from this project. See the Equal Justice Initiative report for full data about lynchings (the New York Times have mapped this here). Where lynchings have been included they are generally crimes which were especially perpetrated to terrorise the wider community. See the lynching in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1927 where the body of the victim was dragged into the middle of the African American area and burnt.
Framed by racism, segregation and white supremacism, these violent incidents cover almost every aspect of American society. Housing, military, labour, unions, politics, business, religion, justice, police enforcement, education, and immigration. Thus we believe this data traces white supremacist efforts to assert dominance and control using terror and violence over a circa 200 year period.
Our work was well received and was even the subject of a post by Rebecca Onion for Slate magazine.
But unfortunately in December 2018 Google announced that they were going to shut down Fusion Tables, the free resource which we used to build our map and database. In December 2019 this was acted on and our project and data became immediately inaccessible to the public. In the future we hope to migrate the project to a new home and free mapping resource, or alternatively for the result of our labour to be formally adopted by an institution. In the meantime I’ve posted our research on Medium in tabulated form so that it can continue to be of use to researchers and the wider public for educational purposes.
Suggest an incident to be added or a correction
This project is an ongoing effort and we welcome all suggestions. Please get in touch by using the contact form below, or alternatively you can contact me on twitter. If you wish to suggest an incident that fits our criteria or if you have noticed an error then please let us know.
Collective Punishment: Mob Violence, Riots and Pogroms against African American Communities by Liam Hogan et al is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Project Manager and Lead Researcher
Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914)
Co-Researchers
John Levin, Phenderson Clarke, Ramon Jackson, Anthony Watkins II, Adam Fox
Collective Punishment 
I am interested in the Enid, OK event. I read the linked pdf, and it didn’t shed much light on the event itself. I am a lifelong Enid resident, and interested in any academic material you might have access to. The demographic information in the linked pdf is interesting, but doesn’t much touch on the event itself.
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Hello – really happy to learn about this work. I’ve been similarly engaged, but with a slightly different and broader focus on documenting events of racial violence. I’d like to talk with you about our respective efforts if possible.
There is a fair bit of detail about what I’ve been doing here (see Racial Violence Archive):
http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/gward/raceterror/
This link will take you to the mockup of an interactive database similar to yours in many respects (sharing, collecting, visualizing data), but the data distribution/collection features are not yet functional – I have limited programmer support in the form of occasional student labor for now.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~yawenl2/RacialViolenceArchiveMockup/index.html
Geoff Ward
UC Irvine
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To the Collective:
The Artist Faith Ringgold did a US map of American Violence/subtitle The United States of Attica in 1972.
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I was required by my Integrated Media, Writing and Design to pick a digital media project and comment on the page. I think the history on the map provided makes it easy to find certain occurrences that happened during that time range. I just think the design is basic and maybe want to add more to make this page stick out. I also like how the data is organized by City.
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