IDV Story Analysis

Lynching in America is an interactive map supported by EJI and Google that shows racial terror lynchings throughout the United States, accompanied with the captions, “Racial terror lynchings were not limited to the south, but the southern states had the most in the nation: over 4000 between 1877 and 1950.”

The map highlights United States counties in a gradient of red, dark red to bright red representing least to most. In each highlighted county, a number of lynchings has occurred.

The viewer has the option to click on a state. After clicking, the state would be zoomed in, showing the counties that are either blacked out or highlighted in red. If the viewer were to scroll over a county that was highlighted, it would tell them the county’s name and the number of lynchings that occurred in the county.

For example, then the viewer clicks on Missouri, it would zoom into the state and list the number on lynching that occurred—60.

When the viewer would click on Buchanan County, they would see that there was one lynching in the county between 1877–1950.

Additionally, there are five white dot on the map—one in Florida, one in Texas, one in Tennessee and two in Alabama. When the viewer hovers over one, a sentence would appear [see photo above]. Once clicked, a video would play, detailing the reason the person was lynched.

In this case, Elizabeth Lawrence was an elementary school teach that was lynched for scolding white children that were throwing rocks at her. After the video, a short summary appears.

This is a different type of journalistic piece than a person would usually see. Rather than laying out the information, the company decided to map. The information is better absorbed when it’s visual. The viewer can see how widespread racial violence was rather than simply reading words on paper and imagining.