Extrajudicial mob executions (lynchings) of persons, counted by sex and by year of lynching, in US from 1882. Subset of individual lynching instances, with state, date, county, victim race, victim name, mob race, and offense.
Under the direction of Elizabeth Hines and Eliza Steelwater, Project HAL: Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project has collected structured case data on persons lynched in the U.S. from 1882 to 1930. The HAL dataset provides victim demographics and alleged offense. The counts for sex-identified lynching victims in this dataset total 2702 males and 79 females. The dataset includes another 25 victims whose sex was not identified. A total of 2806 lynching victims are thus recorded in the HAL dataset. Lynching records of the Tuskegee Institute indicate that 4585 persons were lynched from 1882 to 1930. Hence the HAL dataset includes 61% of the lynching victims recorded in the Tuskegee Institute records.
From 1882 to 1925, lynchings in the American South exceeded judicially ordered executions. Although lynching was thought to have peaked in the American South in the 1890s, many persons were lynched in the U.S. prior to 1882. No counts currently exist of those lynching victims.
Males and blacks vastly predominated among lynching victims. The HAL dataset indicates that 97% of lynching victims were male. A common source for summary statistics for the more comprehensive Tuskegee Institute records, The Negro Year Book, does not distinguish victims by sex. Summary statistics reported for the Tuskegee Institute records show that 73% of lynching victims were black.
Dataset sheets:
- lynchings by year: Tuskegee College lynch report yearly totals (not by sex), yearly totals by sex from the Historical American Lynchings (HAL) dataset (doesn’t include all lynchings)
- HAL source: case listing, with state, date, county, victim race, victim sex, victim name, mob race, offense
Related datasets: