Collective Punishment: Mob Violence, Riots and Pogroms against African American Communities (1824-1974)

Liam Hogan
2 min readDec 16, 2019

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In 2015 I launched a volunteer collaborative project which sought to collate (and map) a comprehensive record of white mob violence that collectively punished African American communities across the United States. Framed by racism, segregation and white supremacism, these violent incidents cover almost every aspect of American society. Housing, military, labour, unions, politics, business, religion, justice, police enforcement, education, and immigration. Thus we believe this data traces white supremacist efforts to assert dominance and control using terror and violence over a circa 200 year period.

Our work was well received and was the subject of a post by Rebecca Onion for Slate magazine.

Unfortunately in December 2018 Google announced that they were going to shut down Fusion Tables, the free resource which we used to build our map and database. In December 2019 this was acted on and our project and data became immediately inaccessible to the public. We hope to migrate the project to a new home and free mapping resource or for the result of our labour to be formally adopted by an institution. In the meantime I’ve posted our research below in tabulated form so that it can continue to be of use to researchers and the wider public for educational purposes.

290 collated incidents in chronological order (as of December 2019)

Collective Punishment: Mob Violence, Riots and Pogroms against African American Communities by Liam Hogan et al is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Project Manager and Lead Researcher
Liam Hogan

Co-Researchers
John Levin, Phenderson Clarke, Ramon Jackson, Anthony Watkins II and Adam Fox.

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Liam Hogan

Librarian & Historian. Researching and writing about slavery, memory and power. Ko-Fi https://ko-fi.com/liamhogan