Building a New Digital Archive: Documenting Anti-Black Violence in the "Jim Crow" US South, 1930-1954

Today's Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to racial violence, especially lethal police violence, and compared today's violence to lynchings of the Jim Crow era. However, evoking this comparison requires more specific information about the scope and nature of racial violence during the Jim Crow period. Uncover-ing, organizing, and understanding it are the main objectives of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.2 Here, it is important to note that collective vigilante violence extended beyond anti-Black violence. This archive does not claim to be exhaustive of all racially or ethnically motivated violence in the South during this time period. Nor does this arti-cle claim to examine vigilante violence in the U.S. broadly. But, at least in the American South, as far as we know now, during these years, African Americans were the majority of victims.