About

Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky (DRVK Project) is a digital archive of biographies, maps, timelines, educational materials, and transcribed articles. The DRVK’s project team came together around a key purpose: humanizing lynching victims beyond accounts that are heavy on statistics and light on personal narrative. As the projects grows, the DRVK”s seeks to expand its reach to make this data available and publicly accessible.  The project team tries to use online sources that are free and open to the public. Where we can’t find or use free materials (usually due to copyright restrictions), we offer transcribed articles for each lynching victim on the transcription database.

We have two sites! You are currently on the main site which houses biographies and interactive exhibits to explore the history of racial violence in Kentucky.

Click here to start your search of biographies.

Our other site acts as a database for our work and contains all of the transcribed articles and historical documents that have been used for our research.

Click here to start your search of transcribed articles. 

The project goals are to:

Refute long-standing, but false claims that a milder form of racism existed in Kentucky than in other southern states. This project researches and develops biographies of every person who was lynched in Kentucky between 1880 and 1955 using historical tools like census record data, birth and death certificates, and newspaper articles.

Encourage cooperation across the Commonwealth as community members come to terms with the events of the past, memorialize injustice, and encourage reconciliation.

Provide undergraduate students with essential experiential learning and encourages career readiness.  Student interns practice the detective work that archival research requires, learning to use microfilm, census records, court transcripts, city directories, property deeds and more, under the careful direction of professor advisors. 
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The Commonwealth Institute of Black Studies (CIBS) serves as the administrative host for Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky. To find out more about other projects at CIBS, please click here for the CIBS website.

To speak with a specialist about Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky, click here.