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
Charles Sing Was Murdered in an Anti-Miscegenation Attack
1913-09-03Chicago, Illinois • Lynching
On September 3, 1913, Charles Sing, a Chinese American restaurateur in Chicago, was fatally beaten and stabbed in his home, while his white wife, Alice Sing, was left unconscious with a fractured skull. <i>The Bamberg Herald</i> reported that police believed the couple “were attacked by white men living in the vicinity because of his marriage to an American woman.” The killing stands out in the archive as a northern lynching linked not to labor conflict or criminal accusation, but to hostility toward interracial marriage.
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