THE RECORD OF RACIAL TERROR
LYNCHING WASN’T HIDDEN.
IT WAS DOCUMENTED.
Newspapers announced it. Crowds gathered to witness it. Photographers recorded it. Images were circulated, collected, and sometimes sold.
The photographs and newspaper accounts preserved in this archive document more than individual acts of violence. They record a system of racial terror used against Black Americans — and the communities, institutions, and public culture that surrounded it.
THESE ARE NOT JUST IMAGES OF WHAT HAPPENED.
THEY ARE RECEIPTS OF WHO SAW IT HAPPEN.
THE FULL RECORD
Explore the Lynching Archive.
SOME RECEIPTS ARE NOT FOR SALE.
DOCUMENTARY RECORD
The photographs and records that follow are preserved here as historical evidence, not offered as wall art.
They document the victims, the crowds, and the public spectacle of racial terror. Their purpose here is not decoration. It is remembrance, context, and record.
CONTENT NOTICE
This section contains authentic historical photographs documenting racial terror and lynching. Some images may be disturbing.
DOCUMENTARY RECORD · NOT OFFERED FOR SALE
Lige Daniels — Center, Texas, August 3, 1920
Lige Daniels was seventeen years old.
He was accused of murdering an elderly white woman named Mrs. Tom Richards. On August 3, 1920, a mob stormed the county jail, overpowered the sheriff, removed Daniels from his cell, and hanged him from a tree in the courthouse square. An estimated thousand people witnessed the lynching.
DOCUMENTARY RECORD · NOT OFFERED FOR SALE
Will Brown — Omaha, Nebraska, September 28, 1919
Will Brown was a Black packinghouse worker in Omaha, Nebraska. On September 28, 1919, a white mob of thousands stormed the Douglas County courthouse where Brown was being held on a charge of assaulting a white woman. The mob overpowered police, set the courthouse on fire, and seized Brown. He was beaten, shot, hanged, and his body burned in the street at the intersection of 17th and Dodge.
DOCUMENTARY RECORD · NOT OFFERED FOR SALE
Laura Nelson and Her Son — Okemah, Oklahoma, 1911
Their names were Laura Nelson and L.D. Nelson. On May 25, 1911, they were lynched by a white mob that had removed them from the county jail. Laura had been accused of shooting a deputy sheriff who came to her home to investigate a stolen hog. Her teenage son L.D. was accused of the original theft.
DOCUMENTARY RECORD · NOT OFFERED FOR SALE
IDENTITY UNCONFIRMED
Between 1877 and 1950, the Equal Justice Initiative documented over 4,000 racial terror lynchings in the American South. Hundreds more occurred in Northern and Midwestern states, often in cities, at night, in public squares — places where people gathered not despite the visibility but because of it.