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…
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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…
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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.
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When 17-year-old Henry Smith left Paris, Texas, after being questioned in the rape and murder of a white toddler, a railroad company offered free transportation to anyone who wanted to…
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The 1947 lynching of Willie Earle in Greenville, South Carolina, by some accounts the state’s last, was just like so many others.
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On a late September night in 1919, about 100 Black farmers seeking fairer prices for their crops gathered for a union meeting at a church a few miles north of…
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It was a Sunday morning, July 12, 1914. The woman had been in the Elloree, South Carolina, jailhouse since the night before. Soon, a mob would come, put her in…
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It was May 18, 1918, and Mary Turner was grieving. Her husband, Hayes Turner, had been lynched without a trial, accused of being an accomplice in the murder of a…
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White men bought ammunition and stopped at saloons on a hot summer day in 1910 in Slocum, Texas. They had sheltered their wives and children in churches and schools. They…
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In 1906, two of Atlanta’s most prominent newspapermen committed an act that many of today’s journalists would consider a sin: Hoke Smith, the publisher of The Atlanta Journal, and Clark…
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