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
Tem Ah Yeck and Ah Juy Died as Chinatown Burned
1886-06-17Truckee, California • Riot
On June 17, 1886, a fire destroyed nearly all of Truckee’s Chinatown, including the joss house, and killed Tem Ah Yeck and Ah Juy, who suffocated in a cellar. <i>The Evening Mail</i> reported that “piles of ashes are all that indicate where Chinatown existed,” while the few Chinese residents left in town were “packing up their effects and getting ready to leave.” Contemporary white papers blamed a stovepipe and even hinted at a Chinese plot, but the deaths occurred in the middle of Truckee’s anti-Chinese boycott and expulsion campaign, when the destruction of Chinatown completed the town’s purge of its Chinese community.
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