Texas History: Digital project documents more than 700 Texas lynchings
Regular Think, Texas readers already know about the Texas Freedom Colony Project, a Texas A&M University effort to collect, collate and share data and memories about hundreds of independent settlements of land-owning Black Texans after Emancipation. Guided by professor Andrea Roberts, it combines fresh scholarship with digital tools, extensive interviews and crowdsourcing to tell the half-lost stories of free African Americans who did not move to the cities, nor did they work their former enslavers’ land as sharecroppers.
Very recently, I ran across another valuable and somewhat similar project, this one about the history of lynching in our state, a project overseen by professor Jeffrey Littlejohn at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. Called Lynching in Texas, the project’s website displays data and newspaper stories about the mob torture and killing of primarily African Americans and Hispanics.
Although these terrorist acts, meant to suppress entire communities, are often associated with the period immediately after Emancipation, they stretch back far before the Civil War and persisted well into the late 20th century.
The reader does not need to be reminded that mob violence is still with us: The recent attack on the national Capitol included the trappings of historical lynchings, including nooses, gallows, racist symbols and chants to hang officials. The fact that the mob was overwhelmingly white did not escape the attention of those of us who lived through the waning days of modern lynching, including the beating and killing of Michael Donald in Mobile, Ala., in 1981.
Read more: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/history/2021/01/15/lynching-in-texas-website-sam-houston-state-history-data/4145151001/
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