Lynchings were often public events. Crowds gathered, newspapers announced them, and photographs of victims were sold as postcards. Victims were accused of crimes without trials or killed for things like trying to vote, talking back to a white person or running a successful business. The journalist Ida B. Wells documented these killings in the 1890s and showed that most were not tied to any real crime.
The Equal Justice Initiative found 4,075 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states and more than 300 in other states between 1877 and 1950. Congress failed to pass a federal anti-lynching law for more than a century. The House passed the Dyer bill in 1922, but Southern senators blocked it.
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act finally made lynching a federal hate crime in March 2022. EJI's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, opened in 2018 to name the victims.