Why “The Last RECORDED Lynching” IS NOT the Same As “The LAST Lynching”

White Americans desire to be free from a past they do not want to remember,

while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.”

—Nikole Hannah-Jones

We live in a country that doesn’t test rape kits from sexual assaults. You think they have an accurate database of lynchings? -Tonya GJ Prince

Some people are still in the business of trusting the very institutions and systems that were doing the killing to be honest about the killing. Injustice does not seek crowds or accuracy; it seeks forgetting. Disappearance. Erasure. Vanishing, if possible.

Oh the patterns of interrogation of sexual violence and racism are keeping true to their game I see.

You know nothing, don’t want to know anything, and then all of a sudden you know everything.

There was no national, official system for tracking lynchings; even the best historical lists are compiled long after the fact and depend heavily on press coverage, which was uneven and biased

When you see lists like “the last lynching in Alabama” or “the last lynching in Georgia,” those statements mean:

the last one that was documented, verified, and entered into official or scholarly records

Not the last one that necessarily happened.

Those are two very different things.

Why many lynchings were never recorded

Here are the historical realities:

Many killings happened in rural areas with no newspapers.

• Local officials often refused to investigate or deliberately covered them up.
• Families were threatened into silence.
• Black witnesses risked death for speaking.
• Deaths were labeled as “accidents,” “unknown causes,” or “self-defense.”
• Some victims were buried without names or formal reports.

So the historical record is incomplete by design, not by accident.

What historians actually mean when they publish dates

When organizations like the NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, Equal Justice Initiative, or state archives publish lynching timelines, they are saying:

“These are the cases we can prove with surviving evidence.”

Not:

“These are the only ones that occurred.”

Every serious scholar in this field understands this.

The deeper truth

• Lynching was not just an event.
• It was a system of terror.
• And systems of terror do not leave clean paperwork.

So when someone says:

“That was the last lynching in this state.”

The historically accurate response is:

“The last one we can confirm.” (same with sexual and domestic violence. We will never know the full scope of the evil doings.)

There may have been others:

• undocumented
• misclassified
• hidden
• or never safely reported

“I want to be able to abuse, harm, and violate you AND tell the lie like I like it told.”

“But It Wasn’t In Her Book”

Why Now?

“Don’t say that.”

Black communities often could not safely report, protest, or publicly document these killings because doing so risked more violence, so much knowledge remained oral or was lost……

Before Pam Grier and others, yes OUR parents spoke of walking in the woods or walking to school and encountering hanging bodies. It is why we were admonished to ALWAYS stay together and watch one another. To check in. 

It is why neighbors watched over us. It gave neighbors permission to ask probing questions about our whereabouts. It is why every neighbor came out of the house in house coat, rollers, and slippers-because witnessing is still essential in a world that will disappear your whereabouts. 

* I have not sat and watched the film “Stand by Me” closely. As a young girl, none of those type of stories of teens setting off going to see a dead body hit me the same. Not even stuff like Blair Witch Project. Too close to my reality to be entertaining. Southern woods and even alleys start to feel different. Because they are for you.

Not when you see and hear tears of your loved ones who lived through the true-to-life shocking thing while they were taking a cut through to the store. In neighborhoods you know well. Trees. Leaves that return to make new memories but not without the people who should be here still.  

They don’t tell these stories with wonderment and amazement. Heartbreak. People that you know to be made of steel….crumble. Because they are of such strong character, they don’t shoo the memories away. They stand up to them. Deal with them. Process them in their own particular way.

In rape, domestic violence, and racism, harm insists on walking in darkness and no one is allowed to tell the story or even remember.  They liked Pam Grier enough when she was being pretty in their eyes.

When she started speaking about all of these truths-as she always had but folks were busy looking at her pretty- they didn’t like her anymore. 

Because like many women, there is so much more to her and you either you can handle that or not.

If you really believe in “the system’s” ability to be all knowing, ask your local law enforcement to tell you exactly how many people in your area have been victimized by domestic violence, rape, incest, molestation? Ask them whether every rape kit has been tested? Ask them if they’ve found every missing person? Or the person responsible, if there is suspected criminal involvement.

Now add racism, shame, and discomfort.  That’s lynching. We just have no way of knowing what has been intentionally hidden.

FURTHER READING

• **Recorded lynchings are the cases that make it into official or semi‑official counts using a specific definition and source base, while unreported lynchings are the incidents that never met those criteria, were hidden, or were too dangerous to document, so they do not appear in the statistics.

​

• Saying “the last lynching” based only on recorded data implies the terror ended when newspapers and organizations stopped counting, but projects like EJI emphasize that racial‑terror lynching continued beyond those dates; what stopped was the tracking, not necessarily the violence.

• ​Because existing lists rely heavily on mainstream newspapers, they overrepresent incidents that white editors chose to publicize and underrepresent those that white communities preferred to hide; this has produced both undercounting (especially of Black victims) and occasional overcounting or misclassification (often of white victims) that later research corrects

• Different projects use different definitions of lynching (for example, whether to include killings by small mobs, killings partly involving law officers, or “massacres”), so the same killing might be counted by one dataset and excluded by another.

• Many lynchings, especially in small or rural communities, were never reported in mainstream newspapers at all, or were buried in euphemistic language (“killed while resisting arrest,” “died trying to escape”).
• There was no national, official system for tracking lynchings; even the best historical lists are compiled long after the fact and depend heavily on press coverage, which was uneven and biased

Heads Up: Lying Is a Powerful Abuse Tactic