Context

The numbers behind the record

This tracker follows the hanging deaths of Black Americans that drew public scrutiny. Here's the backdrop: how often hanging deaths happen nationally, who they happen to, how that's changed since 1950, and the history that shapes how people read these deaths today.

Lynchings documented, 1882 to 1968, and deaths in this record, 2000 to now

Black Americans lynched (Tuskegee Institute)People in this record, colored by where their case stands

Two different records on one time scale. The red bars are lynchings the Tuskegee Institute documented. The small blocks are deaths in this record, most officially ruled suicides; the record doesn't count them as lynchings. Each block is one person.

What this tracker holds

62people since 2000

66%found in the South

49ruled suicide, 38 disputed by family

1with someone charged

Live counts from this site. The tracker isn't a census: it includes deaths that drew news coverage or official attention, and earlier cases are underrepresented because less of that coverage is online.

The national baseline

Hanging is one of the most common methods of suicide in the U.S. Federal statistics group it with strangulation and suffocation, so the counts below cover all three. In 2023 about 12,000 people died by suicide this way, close to a quarter of all suicides. Homicides by hanging, strangulation or suffocation run to a few hundred a year, and around a hundred more hangings each year are left undetermined.

Deaths by hanging, strangulation or suffocation in one year, 2023. Area to scale

Suicides from NCHS source; homicides and undetermined deaths from CDC's violent death reporting system, which counts slightly fewer deaths source.

The suicide count climbed from 6,635 in 2003 to a peak of 13,840 in 2018 and has fallen since, to 11,453 in 2024. source

Black Americans

For most of the past 75 years Black Americans died by suicide at far lower rates than white Americans. That gap is narrowing. The Black suicide rate climbed 25% from 2018 to 2023, and the steepest rise has been among the young: hanging suicides among Black adolescents grew faster than in any other group between 1999 and 2020, about 4% a year.

Suicide rate by hanging or suffocation per 100,000, 2000 and 2020

Age-adjusted; Black and white are non-Hispanic. The Black rate rose 67% and stayed the lowest of the three. source

3,911Black Americans died by suicide in 2023, up from 3,022 in 2018 source

945of them were 10 to 24 years old source

+4.2%yearly rise in hanging suicides among Black adolescents, 1999 to 2020, the fastest of any group source

Black men who died by suicide in 2020: more than 2,300. Each dot is one man

Found in a tree or other natural area: 10Other deaths by hanging or asphyxiation (about a quarter in all)Other suicides, by other means

CDC violent death data, as reported by The Nation. Hanging is common; a death in a tree is rare, and that rarity is why families and advocates treat those cases as anomalies. The Nation also reports 34 found outdoors. source

The decades before

From 1950 to 2000 the white male suicide rate stayed about two to three times the Black male rate. Hanging accounted for roughly 18 to 21% of suicides by Black men in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. When Black youth suicide doubled between 1980 and 1995, guns drove nearly all of the increase. The sharp rise in hanging is mostly a 21st-century change.

Male suicide rate per 100,000, 1950 to 2000

Age-adjusted, after the paired form of Du Bois's 1900 plates. source

1964 to 1980: hanging's share of suicides among Black and other nonwhite men went from 18% to 21%, against about 14% for white men. source
1980 to 1995: the suicide rate among Black youth aged 10 to 19 rose 114%, from 2.1 to 4.5 per 100,000. Firearms accounted for 96% of the rise. source
1987 to 1992, Mississippi: 41 people died by hanging in county and city jails, nearly half of them Black, by the Clarion-Ledger's count. Civil rights groups demanded federal action. A 1993 Justice Department review of 18 jails found poor conditions but no evidence the deaths were anything other than suicides. source
1981, Mobile, Alabama: Klan members killed Michael Donald, 19, and left him hanging from a tree. Three Klansmen were convicted or pleaded guilty, and one was executed in 1997. A 1987 civil verdict of $7 million against the United Klans of America forced the group to sell its headquarters. It's the clearest modern case of a racial killing staged as a hanging. source

How deaths get ruled

A death's official manner (suicide, homicide, accident or undetermined) is set by a medical examiner or a coroner, and the two systems differ. Medical examiners are physicians, usually forensic pathologists. Coroners are often elected, and in many states the job requires no medical training.

25states use elected or appointed coroners in some or all counties; 22 states and D.C. use medical examiners only source

2.4×the odds a Black death is ruled undetermined rather than suicide, compared with a white death (2003 to 2005) source

Research on racial bias in these rulings is thin. One study found pathologists more likely to rule a child's death a homicide when the child was Black, given identical facts source. Studies of misclassification mostly find Black suicides undercounted, usually overdoses ruled accidental. No national study has tested whether hanging deaths of Black Americans ruled suicide were misclassified homicides. The question hasn't been answered either way.

The lynching record

Between Reconstruction and the civil rights era, white mobs killed thousands of Black Americans, often by hanging and often in public, sometimes before crowds in the thousands. The Tuskegee Institute counted 4,743 lynchings from 1882 to 1968, 3,446 of them of Black people. The Equal Justice Initiative documents more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings from 1877 to 1950, plus at least 2,000 during Reconstruction. By the Senate's own account, 99% of the perpetrators were never punished.

Black Americans lynched, by decade, 1882 to 1968

Each arc's length is the decade's count, after Du Bois's spiral plate. The 1880s cover 1882 to 1889; the 1960s, 1960 to 1968. source

Where: Black Americans lynched by state, 1882 to 1968

Shading: Black Americans lynched in each state, 1882 to 1968 (Tuskegee Institute)None recorded1 to 2021 to 100101 to 300More than 300

Tuskegee Institute counts, with this record's cases as dots. EJI's later research finds higher totals: Mississippi 656, Georgia 599, Louisiana 557 for 1877 to 1950. source

Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills went before Congress in the first half of the 20th century. Three passed the House and none survived the Senate. The Senate apologized in 2005. Lynching became a federal crime only in 2022, with the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. source source

Reading these cases against that history

Most hanging deaths of Black Americans that draw lynching suspicion are ruled suicides by medical examiners, and federal reviews of the highest-profile cases have generally found no foul play. Families and advocates point to the other side of the record: rulings announced within hours, scenes that weren't preserved, coroners with a few days' training, a lynching history whose perpetrators almost never faced justice, and cases like Willie Andrew Jones Jr.'s, where a suicide ruling was later contested and a civil court awarded his family more than $11 million. In 2026 the advocacy group JULIAN counted 70 suspected modern lynchings in seven Southern states since 2000; its methods for selecting cases haven't been published. source

This tracker doesn't call any modern case a lynching. It records what officials found, what families say, and what evidence is public, so readers can weigh them side by side. See the cases.

Timeline

1865 to 1876
At least 2,000 Black people are killed in racial terror lynchings during Reconstruction. source
1892
Lynchings peak at 230 in a single year by Tuskegee's count. Ida B. Wells counts 241. source
1900
Rep. George Henry White introduces the first federal anti-lynching bill. source
1922
The Dyer bill passes the House and is killed by a Senate filibuster.
1955
Emmett Till, 14, is murdered in Mississippi. source
1981
Michael Donald is killed by Klan members in Mobile, Alabama. source
1987 to 1993
Hanging deaths in Mississippi jails draw national scrutiny and a Justice Department review. source
2005
The Senate apologizes for never passing an anti-lynching law. source
2018
EJI opens the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. source
2022
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act makes lynching a federal crime. source
2026
JULIAN publishes A Crimson Record, counting 70 suspected modern lynchings since 2000. source

Notes on the data

Federal mortality data codes hanging together with strangulation and suffocation (ICD-10 X70 for suicide, X91 for homicide, Y20 for undetermined). Hanging is the large majority of these deaths but not all of them.
Homicide and undetermined counts come from CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System, which captures slightly fewer deaths than the national vital statistics used for the suicide counts.
Historical rates use different race categories over time ("nonwhite" before 1970, "Black and other" in the 1970s) and different coding revisions. Treat cross-decade comparisons as approximate.
Lynching totals differ by source because each uses a different definition and time span.