Lynchings of African-Americans have been in the news over the past week, since President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast (see my previous post) produced a sustained media discussion of brutality and executions.

Now, the New York Times reports that “the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., released a report on the history of lynchings in the United States, the result of five years of research and 160 visits to sites around the South. The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of ‘racial terror lynchings’ in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.”

The map below presents the geographic distribution of these lynchings of African-Americans.

David Krugler’s 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African-Americans Fought Back (Cambridge, 2014) provides historical context on lynching in the United States—including racial violence that occurred in Illinois, Oklahoma, and other regions beyond the scope of this map.

The New York Times published an article on the Equal Justice Initiative and its map of lynchings in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.