Personalizing Lynch Victims: Using Census Records to Study the History of Southern Mob Violence

ABSTRACT:  Stew Tolnay will describe an ongoing NSF-supported project that is creating a new data source that will allow researchers to introduce information about individual victims into the study of southern lynchings. This effort begins with an inventory that contains limited information about 2,800 victims of lynching in ten southern states between 1882 and 1930.  A team of undergraduate research assistants then search for these victims in the original enumerators' manuscripts for the census just prior to their deaths.  The search for possible matches is supported by a variety of on-line sources including World War I draft registration records, death registrations, and newspaper articles.  The new database will include census information for the victim and all co-resident family members.  The final product will contain census manuscripts, research notes, and supporting documentation used to identify each victim.  Preliminary results based on five states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee) show a rate of "successful" linkages in excess of 40%.  Selected characteristics of the matched lynch victims will be compared to those of a randomly selected sample of non-victims from the same areas.