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
A Mob Lynched a Chinese Servant (Murrieta and his Gang Blamed)
1853-02-11Jackson, California • Lynching
In February 1853, near Jacksonville during the California Gold Rush, a vigilante mob lynched a Chinese servant and another Chinese laborer. The violence was sparked by a local teenager’s claim that the two Chinese men were members of Joaquín Murrieta’s gang. In the panic following a recent Murrieta robbery, armed citizens targeted Chinese laborers. Newspapers reported that “three Chinamen were killed” during the frenzy. The mob’s lynching of the Chinese servant (without trial or evidence) illustrates how “justice” could be distorted by racial animus of the times. This early lynching set a precedent for anti-Chinese violence, cloaked in the frontier vigilantism of the time yet fundamentally motivated by Sinophobic resentment of Chinese miners in the camps.
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