The project will construct a new database for the study of southern lynchings that occurred between 1882 and 1930. It builds on the inventory of confirmed lynching victims/incidents that was created with previous support from the National Science Foundation. This inventory includes vital, but relatively limited, information about each event - location (state and county), race and sex of victim, date of occurrence, and purported reason for the lynching. The primary objective of this project will be to increase significantly the amount of information about victims that is available to researchers. The PI will search for each victim in the enumerators' manuscripts of the U.S. Census that preceded his or her lynching. For example, the investigator will search the 1880 census for victims lynched during the 1880s, the 1900 census for victims lynched during the 1900s, and so on. To conduct this search we will use the online and searchable original enumerators' manuscripts that are available through Ancestry.Com. Our search will begin, using the victim's first and last names, in the county in which he was lynched. When necessary, the PI will expand the geographic focus for the search to include counties of first-degree or second-degree adjacency to the target county. Larger geographic areas (e.g., states and neighboring states) will be searched for victims with uncommon names. Successful matches between the lynching inventory and census records will be determined by considering a number of factors, including the following: first and last name, sex, race, age, and location. In those cases where multiple matches are possible, the PI will invoke additional search strategies, including information from newspaper accounts, application of optimal matching techniques to names, and searches of enumerators' manuscripts from subsequent censuses. The resulting database will include all census information that is available from the household record and person records for the victim and for all co-resident individuals. Geocodes will also be included in the file in order to facilitate the linkage of contextual characteristics (e.g., for counties) to the individual- and household-level data. Pilot testing for Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee in 1880 and 1920 indicates a potential rate of successful matches of at least 40%.
Broader Impacts. The project will provide a data resource for researchers studying race/ethnicity, violence, inequality, and southern history. It will support richer and more rigorous, theoretically-driven, quantitative and non-quantitative approaches to the study of lynching by providing far more information about the victims, their families and households, and their communities than has ever been available before. The completed database will be made available through an existing data archive (e.g., the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research), or via a dedicated website at the University of Washington.
