5. Alabama
Over 350 lynchings were recorded in Alabama. Black people were murdered for wearing their World War I uniforms, failing to call a police officer “mister,” or for simply “standing around.”
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators.”
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” - they were suspected of supporting the Union during the Civil War.
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 accused of whistling at a white woman and was subsequently hunted down, tortured, and thrown in a river.