The John Crow Project

Welcome to the John Crow Project. This site revives a neglected chapter of American history: the white supremacist violence and legal exclusion aimed at Chinese immigrants after the Gold Rush. The first attacks appeared in California’s goldfields in 1849, then rolled east along wagon roads, rail lines, and river towns. By the early 1900s the violence had crossed the Mississippi River and collided with the entrenched racism of Jim Crow. Drawing on newly compiled lynching databases, digitized newspapers, and recent scholarship, this website documents how vigilante terror and discriminatory laws worked hand-in-hand to drive Chinese communities from mines, rail camps, and towns.

In the pages of this website, you will find interactive charts and maps of more than documented lynchings and massacres, timelines that pair major exclusion laws with surges in mob violence, and primary-source newspaper articles that preserve the voices of victims, witnesses, and resisters. Our goal is to make this “red record” of the West impossible to ignore, to honor those who were lost, and to provide educators, descendants, and researchers the tools they need to confront the legacy of what we call John Crow—a western counterpart to Jim Crow that sought expulsion rather than segregation.

The term John Crow is a deliberate conceptual framework that draws upon two powerful signifiers from American racial history. “Crow” evokes Jim Crow, the system of white supremacist law and terror that subjugated African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. “John” comes from John Chinaman, the 19th-century racial caricature used in newspapers, political cartoons, and popular speech to dehumanize Chinese immigrants—often depicted as servile, alien, and unassimilable. By merging these two names, John Crow names a parallel system of racial terror in the American West: not one of subjugated inclusion, but of violent exclusion. This system deployed lynchings, purges, exclusion laws, and the destruction of Chinatowns to remove Chinese immigrants from the national body politic. While Jim Crow enforced racial hierarchy through control, John Crow enforced it through erasure. This project uses the name John Crow to surface the hidden history of anti-Chinese racial violence and to extend Ida B. Wells’s “Red Record” into the western landscape of American racial terror.

Explore the evidence, contribute your family's stories, and help us extend this record—what you see here is a starting point, not an endpoint. Together we can uncover, verify, and map new cases and perspectives, transforming collective memory and advancing justice through truth.