Our Methods
The Alabama Memory Project focuses specifically on lynchings of Black Americans by white Americans for the purpose, be it stated or implied, of strengthening and extending white supremacy. These "racial terror lynchings" occurred outside of any fair and impartial legal process and were not some form of “frontier justice.” Each was meant to subdue, intimidate, and control Black Americans.
Racial terror lynchings are by far the most common form of lynching in American history. Few victims ever received proper burial or commemoration. Indeed, many were killed with the intent of obscuring their identities and destroying their bodies. A distinctive legacy of these murders was a range of racist policies and beliefs that infected American life for generations.
The term racial terror lynchings was coined by the Equal Justice Initiative in in its 2017 report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. The Alabama Memory Project has identified over 800 racial terror lynchings in the state of Alabama between the years of 1865 and 1966, more than half of which were previously unidentified. To learn more about lynching history nationwide, click here to view this article by our founder and director, Dr. John Giggie, and Emma Jackson Pepperman, MA in history from the University of Alabama, published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for American History.
The Alabama Memory Project evaluates every story about a lynching carefully and strive to locate corroborating evidence. Yet, we recognize that few lynchings have an ample store of documentation. Sometimes family members tell us about a lynching of a brother or uncle and we cannot easily find supporting accounts in newspapers or court records. In these cases, we trust our community members and rely on recent work on the histories of violence against Black Americans, particularly violence against Black women, to guide us. Click here for a short project bibliography.
Alabama Memory Project takes a multi-step process to identify and document lynchings. We identify cases in three different ways. Most commonly, we comb through records published by the Equal Justice Initiative, the Monroe Work Today Project, and the CSDE Database. We also rely on stories about lives lost lynching given to us by community members. Finally, we research contemporary newspaper databases, like newspaper.com and Library of Congress’s Chronicling America, focusing on a specific place, date range, and using a range of search terms. For example, focusing on an Tuscaloosa County from 1870-1930 and using words to describe a Black citizen (“Black” or “Negro”) and ways she or he could have been killed (“shot “ or “burned”) has led to nearly a ninety new cases.
After we identify cases, we search through newspapers, congressional testimonies, state and county legal records, and local histories for information. We also investigate published oral histories and, when possible, conduct interviews with community members across the state.
We also track attempted lynchings as a critical way to capture the broad impact of racial terror lynchings. We discover these cases the same way we discover successful lynchings. See “Attempted Lynchings” under definitions for more information. For a full copy of our research guide, please click here.
We begin our research at the end of the Civil War and continue through the late twentieth century. Our goal is eventually to include the twentieth-first century.
Note on sources: We do not record or rely on pictures of lynched victims. Pictures do not help us remember the victims for who they were when they were alive and instead often glorify their deaths.