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
Young Fooke Was Hanged by Lumbermen
1901-07-09Mt. Breckenridge, California • Lynching
On July 9, 1901, at the Mount Breckenridge lumber mill in Kern County, a Chinese cook known as Young Fooke, Young Fook, or Yung Fooke was seized and hanged by lumbermen after he allegedly attacked Mrs. Kenney and wounded her husband and child with a butcher knife. Newspapers across the country repeated the same account, reporting that the men “placed a rope around his neck and hanged him to a tree.” A coroner’s inquest was held, but all 18 witnesses swore they “did not know” who carried out the hanging, and the jury returned a verdict that the deceased had been hanged by “parties unknown.” Several versions added that he was believed to be insane, but none identified the men who carried out the hanging.
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