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A Red Record

Inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative’s recent report on lynchings in the American South, this project seeks to locate and document lynchings in North Carolina using DH Press.

Begun in February of 2015 and initially powered by the bright young minds in the First Year Seminar “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” A Red Record aims to

  • pinpoint, using latitude-longitude pairs, the locations of lynchings in North Carolina.
  • provide access to relevant manuscript material, particularly digital newspaper articles.
  • offer users both broad and specific information about lynching in North Carolina for research, teaching, and other uses.
  • contribute to an important conversation about race, violence, and power in the United States.

White North Carolinians did not make their state a leader in lynchings, much to the relief of the state’s governors. But North Carolinians still lynched at least 181 people between the end of the Civil War and 1960.

This project seeks to address the irony that despite the fact that members of lynch mobs documented their activities deliberately and prolifically, the physical spaces by and large remain unmarked. This project will visualize lynchings in new ways, privileging images of modern cites of historic lynchings over the mob-produced images of damaged black bodies that were intended to terrorize the wider black community.

Future iterations of the project will seek to, among other things, integrate lynching and death penalty data and include all lynchings, not just those that resulted in a death. Take a look.