5. Alabama
Over 350 lynchings were recorded in Alabama. Black people were murdered for wearing their WWI uniforms, failing to call a cop “mister,” or for simply “standing around.” Not too different from what happens today.
4. Louisiana
More than 400 lynchings were recorded in Louisiana. Often, white workers and planters, threatened by their Black fellow plantation workers’ growing freedom and financial prospects, used lynchings to remind Black laborers that they weren’t truly “free.”
3. Texas
Over 500 people were lynched in Texas. Included in that number are over 140 white people, lynched for supporting racial equality, and the 41 people who were lynched en masse at the “Great Hanging at Gainesville.”
2. Georgia
In Georgia, over 530 people were lynched, including a 21-year old pregnant Black woman named Mary Turner - because she protested the murder of her husband, Hazel, who had been lynched the day before.
1. Mississippi
The state with the most lynchings was Mississippi - more than 580 recorded lynchings took place there. The most famous of these was Emmett Till, who was senselessly hunted down, tortured, and thrown in a river.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that lynchings are a phenomenon of the past. Just say the names of modern-day victims like Trayvon Martin, Kenneth Herring, and most recently, Ahmaud Arbery, and you’ll see it’s an atrocity that still persists today.