A Red Record documents lynchings in the American South, starting with North Carolina. The title, A Red Record, is drawn from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s work by the same name and is intended, in a small way, to recognize Wells-Barnett’s remarkable courage and commitment to justice. Our research also corroborates Wells-Barnett’s core argument: that lynching was much more than just a response to crime. It was part of a narrative of white supremacy that sought to write out Black success, Black families, and Black personhood.
Started in February of 2015, A Red Record aims to:
- identify and mark the locations of lynchings in the former Confederacy, and over time, all the states in the former Confederacy
- provide access to relevant manuscript material about lynching events
- remember the targets of lynching as whole persons with families, jobs, and identities beyond that of victims
- offer users both broad and specific information about lynching for research, teaching, and other uses
- create a space for one facet of an important conversation about race, violence, and power in the United States
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 where lynchings took place remain, by and large, unmarked. This project visualizes lynchings in new ways, to the extent possible privileging images of modern sites of historic lynchings over the mob-produced images of bodies that were intended to terrorize African Americans.
Future iterations of the project will seek to engage community partners in diverse styles of documentation; integrate lynching and death penalty data; address the politics of press coverage; and include attempted lynchings, not just those that resulted in a death. The project has been led since its inception by Seth Kotch, co-founding director of the CHW, and Elijah Gaddis, co-director of the CHW.
