Source article Tier A
Lynching in America / Reconstruction in America (EJI)
Equal Justice Initiative. 'Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror' (3rd ed.) and 'Reconstruction in America' (2020). Verbatim: 'EJI researchers documented 4,075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950.' And: 'Our newest report, Reconstruction in America, documents nearly 2,000 additional lynchings between 1865 and 1876, raising the total number of documented lynchings to nearly 6,500.'
Custody docket
- Record
- eji-lynching-in-america
- Type
- article
- Trust tier
- A
- Status
- published
Sources are graded A (primary) / B (secondary academic) / C (secondary journalism) / D (tertiary or contested). See the manifesto’s Evidence Standard for full criteria.
The victim-by-victim documentation behind the essay’s episodes-versus- victims paragraph: 4,075 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states, 1877 to 1950, plus nearly 2,000 during Reconstruction, nearly 6,500 documented in all. Both figures verbatim from EJI’s own pages, fetched 2026-08-06 (companion page: https://eji.org/reports/reconstruction-in-america-overview/).
Scope of this record, stated plainly. The essay uses EJI’s counts to say one thing: an event database’s 438 lynching episodes is not a count of the dead, and the measuring stick has defaults too. The commonly circulated “more than 4,400” figure is EJI-associated but was NOT captured as a verbatim quote in this pass and is not used anywhere in the essay. The two counts (event episodes; documented victims) are different instruments and the essay does not present either as correcting the other.
Provenance
- Creator
- Equal Justice Initiative
- Published
- 2020
- Accessed
- 2026-08-06
- External record
- https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/
Cited by
Theme custody
No theme record references this source.