EXPLORE LYNCHING COVERAGE
White-owned newspapers helped create a culture that fomented racial terror lynchings across the U.S.
BROWSE OUR DATABASE
By Jack Rasiel, Rachel Logan, Nick McMillan, Kara Newhouse, Sahana Jayaraman, Trisha Ahmed, Molly Castle Work, Adam Marton and Sean Mussenden
Using computational historical research methods, the Howard Center analyzed more than 40,000 scanned newspaper pages to identify and classify problematic historical coverage of racial terror lynchings by white-owned newspapers. All of the papers in the database, which we expect to continue updating, were still published in some form when they were added to the database. The current name of a paper may differ from a paper's historical name included in the newspaper scans included here because of newspaper mergers, purchases and ownership changes. Read more about how we defined harmful coverage and traced newspaper lineages.
The database was the product of nearly a year of computationally driven, historical research. It relied on a large-scale text analysis of historical newspaper scans stored in digital archives. It would not have been possible without the work of civil rights activists, journalists and historians over the last 150 years to document individual lynchings and the work of archivists, librarians and historians to build digital repositories of historic newspapers.