Legacies of Lynching in North Carolina (2025-2026)

Background

In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit founded by lawyer and anti-death penalty advocate Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery, Alabama, set out to do unprecedented public history work chronicling the scope and scale of lynchings in America.

Documenting over 4,000 lynchings of Black Americans that occurred between the close of Reconstruction and 1950, EJI called on local communities to research histories of racial terror in their own counties and bring together coalitions to mark the sites of violence in their midst.

Inspired by the pioneering work of Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, communities across North Carolina are coming together in an effort to confront and acknowledge the dark history of racial violence. Eleven county-based coalitions from Alamance, Buncombe, Chatham, Craven, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Orange, New Hanover, Rowan, Wake and Warren Counties have taken significant steps towards documenting lynchings and honoring their victims in their local communities.

In March, UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South will host a day-long gathering to address the legacies of lynching and mob violence in North Carolina. This event will bring together community leaders, university scholars, undergraduate students from both Primarily White Institutions (PWIs) and Historically black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and lifelong learners to foster collaboration and dialogue.

The efforts of the ten county-based coalitions and the first North Carolina state convening on lynchings require sustained support for maintenance and expansion. These initiatives can be further strengthened by utilizing the skills, talents and resources of students and faculty from Duke and UNC and by fostering collaboration to elevate the work and its impact.

Project Description

This project team seeks to deepen understanding and awareness of North Carolina's history of lynching and racial violence by creating resources for community coalitions and advancing research on the long-term impacts of racial terror. Team members will interpret historical documents, conduct genealogical and oral history research, and preserve historical documents that illuminate the history and long-term effects of lynching on local communities and families.

In order to increase access to historical information for communities, the team will amplify the research of the Equal Justice Initiative Museum alongside the insights of local coalitions and strive to open new research estuaries for emerging coalitions. The team will collect and analyze data on the nuclear family (and close kin) of lynching victims. If traceable, the team will look to ascertain patterns on how families responded to racial violence in both the immediate and long term. Areas of focus may center on migration patterns across the U.S. and long-term patterns of structural racism, particularly health outcomes and access to healthcare.

Team members will provide research to the State Commission for Historical Markers, in an effort to officially document the history of lynching in North Carolina, and aggregate data and information about the 120 known cases of lynching in the North Carolina through a public-facing website.

Anticipated Outputs

Online research hub; data on mob violence and lynching and the long-term effects of racial violence on Black families; partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative Museum; research for the State Commissioner’s development of historical markers

Student Opportunities

Ideally, this project team will have 1-2 graduate students and 10 undergraduate students with strong backgrounds and interests in history, historical data collection, archival research, sociopolitical dynamics, genealogical research political science, sociology and data science.

Team members will meet once a week for three hours. Students will spend the first half of each meeting period enhancing their historical and local knowledge alongside their research skills by reading historical documents (census documents, death certificates, newspaper articles, land deeds, etc.), diving into genealogical research, contributing to oral history collections, and becoming familiar with document preservation. The second half of the meeting will focus on various components of the research project and process. Team members will be broken into two or three sub-groups, focused on different aspects of the project, such as local, historical, genealogical research or oral history; quantitative data aggregation; community engagement, data visualization, design and website building.

A graduate student will be selected to serve as project manager.

Timing

Fall 2025-Spring 2026

• Fall 2025: Begin building knowledge around the historical, social and political dynamics of lynching.
• Spring 2026: Build data sets that append health and demographic data to each case; dig into the genealogical history of a selected number of cases to ascertain the effects of lynching on families; develop a website that aggregates information for public use

Crediting

Academic credit available for fall and spring semesters; summer funding available

 

_{Image: Durham Civil Rights Mural}