The John Crow Project
Documenting the history of anti-Chinese lynchings, riots, and massacres
in the American West (1850 – 1915)
What Is the John Crow Project?
Between the California Gold Rush and the First World War, Chinese immigrants were subjected to a coordinated regime of racial terror—lynchings, riots, expulsions, and legal exclusion. This project calls that Western system “John Crow”: a structure aimed at expulsion rather than subordination.
Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of documented lynchings, digitized newspaper archives, and spatial analysis, this site reconstructs how violence spread—across towns, along rivers and railroads, and through national print networks.
The interactive maps, timelines, and charts presented here translate the quantitative and spatial arguments of the dissertation into web-based form. Where possible, visualizations correspond directly to analytical figures developed in A Murder of Crows.
Quick Start
Browse lynching records by date, place, and event details.
Read article images, transcriptions, and source citations.
Open charts, maps, timelines, and comparative views.
Access structured data used across the archive.
Ask questions and trace evidence across records.
New to the site? Take the guided tour.
Featured Record
White Railroad Workers Lynched Unnamed Chinese Man
1889-02-00Tekoa, Washington • Lynching
As the tumultuous decade of the 1880s came to an end, a mob of white railroad workers lynched an unnamed Chinese laborer near Tekoa in Washington Territory. The Tekoa lynching occurred sometime in February or early March, 1889. Details are sparse. The Daily Astorian reported that: “a Chinaman was hanged to a limb, near Takoa, W. T., recently, for daring to seek work on the railroad in defiance of the edict recently given out by white laborers that ‘no Chinese need to apply’” (Mar. 6, 1889). No evidence that the killers were unpunished has been discovered. The Tekoa lynching was motivated by job competition and spurred by racial animus. White workers often resorted to mob violence in the face of a labor dispute.
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