About this map

Lynchings and racial terror. Massacres and mob attacks on Black neighbourhoods. Expulsions and sundown towns. Redlining and the housing policy that made segregation permanent. Communities cleared for highways, parks and redevelopment. Forced removal and incarceration. Schools closed rather than integrated.

The record is not limited to anti-Black racism, because the history is not. Anti-Chinese expulsions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, killings of Mexican Americans by state police, and massacres of Indigenous people belong on the same map.

Every entry carries at least two sources, and at least one of them has to be a government record, an archive, a university, a museum, or an established reference project with named scholarly editors. Reporting alone never puts a place on this map.

Citation links are restricted to a reviewed allowlist of hosts - plus anything under .gov or .edu. That rule is enforced by a script that runs before the data is loaded, so an entry sourced to a blog, an aggregator or an open wiki cannot be published by accident.

Numbers of dead are given as ranges when the sources disagree, which is often: counts were suppressed at the time, and bodies were hidden. Where the sources only establish a neighbourhood or a county, the map says so rather than inventing a pin.

A great deal. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950 alone; this map shows a small number of individually documented cases. Redlining reached more than 200 cities. Treat an empty area as a gap in this map, never as evidence that nothing happened there.

Each entry on this map is a reviewable text file in the project repository, so a correction is a visible change with a citation attached. If something here is wrong, incomplete or badly framed, that is worth fixing - please open an issue or a pull request.

The full dataset is available as GeoJSON, for anyone who wants to check it or build something else with it.

These records describe killing, mutilation and the destruction of homes. They are written plainly, without photographs of the dead, and entries that describe graphic violence say so before the account begins.