Guides to Research on Lynchings

Summer 2025, 3rd Edition 

This guide is not intended to be a complete manual on researching lynchings. It is only a brief overview of some of the most frequent problems that occur when using newspapers to learn about cases of lynching. We draw these examples from our experience and provide suggestions on how to evaluate sources, confirm or disconfirm information, and balance contradictory claims. We include a very brief overview of other sources of information and end with an example of working through a particularly confusing case.

Western Tennessee, thirty years after the Civil War, was an area undergoing many
changes, all of them straining the racial and class relations of the people that lived in and around
the city of Kerrville. The crops being planted and harvested on the surrounding land had been on
a path of diversification for the past ten years. Cotton, which was once king of the area, was
steadily decreasing in price as the labor needed to sustain the crop was no longer an option.

Data on lynchings have increasingly been employed in economics research. Historical lynching data sets are difficult to use due to measurement error, particularly with respect to the race or ethnicity of the victim. This paper summarizes recent researchers’ efforts to correct and extend data related to race and ethnicity of lynching victims, especially with respect to unpacking the “white” category.

This paper examines the Trenton Massacre, an abduction and lynching of multiple victims that occurred in West Tennessee during the Reconstruction Era. The Trenton Massacre took place just outside of Trenton, the county seat of Gibson County, Tennessee, in August of 1874. Contemporary accounts are contradictory and confusing but agree that 16 African American men were abducted from the Trenton jail and some number of them were lynched in an incident connected to activity by the Ku Klux Klan.

In the 50 years between 1869 and 1918, 50 African Americans were lynched in a sparsely populated three-county area, far removed from the Cotton Belt and outside the ambit of the Tobacco Black Patch, along the state line in northwest Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. The characteristics of lynchings identified in previous studies have little relevance to the lynchings carried out in this three-county area where the African American population seldom exceeded twenty percent of the overall population.