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
Murrieta’s Gang Massacres Chinese Miners
1853-02-21Mud Springs, California • Massacre
In late February 1853, Joaquín Murrieta’s band attacked a Chinese mining camp near Forman’s Ranch at Mud Springs. The <i>Nevada Journal</i> reported that the raiders “killed five Chinamen and wounded five others, some of them mortally,” while robbing the camp of seven thousand dollars in gold dust and nuggets. The attack stands as an early, well-documented massacre of Chinese miners during the Gold Rush, when Chinese camps were exposed to robbery and racialized violence.
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