Research Sources

By Lucy Estep | November 12, 2024

Our team compiles biographies and accounts of lynchings by utilizing primary source databases and published secondary sources on racial violence. Please check with your local public library or university library for access to these databases. Explore below to learn more about these resources.

Looking for a place to start?

Our guiding document is Appendix A of George Wright’s Racial Violence in Kentucky: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings.” Click here to download a PDF of Appendix A.

The Louisville Courier-Journal offers an online spreadsheet lynching victims in Kentucky. It is free of charge to view. Click here to be taken to the spreadsheet. It will open in a new window.

Click here for a research guide for tips on where to begin finding raw data. It also features the NAACP’s Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States.

Newspapers

 

Readex African American Newspapers, 1827 to 1998

Online access to 280 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience.

Public Libraries

 

Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program

The Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program (KDNP) preserves and houses historic and contemporary digitized newspapers from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. They provide online access to nearly one million pages of Kentucky’s first draft of history.

Free

 

Chronicling America: America’s Historic Newspapers

Online access to America’s historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963. This resource includes a Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

Free

 

Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky Research Guide

A research guide to aid interns working on the DRVK project. A collection of many articles and sources used throughout this project.

Free

 

Kentucky Lynchings Spreadsheet (Online)

Lynchings that occurred in the state of Kentucky. Source: Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington. Created by Will Kantlehner IV.

Free

 

Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889 to 1918

A digitally scanned book published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1919 documenting lynchings from 1889 to 1918.

Free

 

Newspapers.com

Online newspaper archive, established in 2012.

Free-mium

 

Ancestry Library Edition

Genealogy collection from ancestry.com that includes census data, vital records, directories, and photos.

Public Libraries

 

Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File

The Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File is a microfilm edition of hundreds of thousands of individual news clippings (1899–1966) compiled from more than 300 major national dailies, leading southeastern dailies, Afro-American newspapers, magazines, religious and special interest publications, and foreign newspapers. The collection represents an important resource for researching the 20th century Afro-American experience in the United States, Africa, and the world. 252 reels, 66-page guide.

Free

 

Chicago Defender, New York Amsterdam News, New York Times Historical Edition, Pittsburgh Courier (ProQuest)

ProQuest houses primary source content from African American newspapers throughout history. The four newspapers listed above were utilized in this project.

Public Libraries

 

Brief Bibliography

 

Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence

Philip Dray,  At The Hand of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America 

Equal Justice Initiative, Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror

Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889-1918

Ida B. Wells-Barnett,  Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900

Kidada Williams,  They Left Great Marks On Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War


 

Videos and Film

 

Cornell University, “Lynching: Selected Resources: Films”

Always in Season (dir. Jaqueline Olive, 2020)

Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day (dir. Christine Turner, 2021)

An Outrage: A Documentary Film About Lynching in the American South (dirs. Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren, 2017)

Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America (Curated by James Allen and John Littlefied, 2000)