By Jack Rasiel, Rachel Logan, Nick McMillan, Kara Newhouse, Sahana Jayaraman, Trisha Ahmed, Molly Castle Work, Adam Marton and Sean Mussenden The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism | Dec. 20,...
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On July 27, 1935, The Chicago Defender, the nation’s most influential Black weekly newspaper, published a front-page photograph of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton’s bodies hanging from an oak tree near Columbus, Mississippi.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of photographs and postcards of Black Americans killed by white mobs in racist terror lynchings were collected, traded and sent through the U.S. postal service.
On the night of July 25, 1946, outside of Monroe, Georgia, a mob of white men linked to the Ku Klux Klan murdered Black sharecroppers George Dorsey, Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger Malcom and Dorothy Dorsey Malcom at the Moore’s Ford Bridge near the Walton County line.
As with other Southern states, the history of Arkansas is replete with examples of lynching. Author Guy Lancaster recorded 365 lynching incidents in the state from 1836 to 1936, a century of racial terror. But without proper acknowledgment, many of these events fade away and become forgotten history.
In March 1904, three men — two Black, one white — gathered on a houseboat on the White River in Arkansas, a tributary to the Mississippi, for an evening of gambling. An argument left the white man injured, setting off a week of racial terror that included a roundup of dozens of Black residents and the lynching of 13.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — It began with questions about why almost all the faces on the wall of honor in the journalism building at the University of Maryland’s flagship campus were of white men.
The long, gruesome history of lynchings in the U.S. is usually understood through the deaths of Black Americans, who for centuries fell victim to extralegal violence.
