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
Giant Powder Blew Up a Chinese Laundry and Killed Chinese Workers
1885-04-14Anaconda, Montana • Mass lynching
Before dawn on April 14, 1885, two charges of giant powder were placed under a Chinese wash house on Front Street in Anaconda. <i>The Anaconda Recorder and New Northwest</i> reported that three Chinese men were killed outright and others badly injured. <i>The Montana Record-Herald</i> described the scene in devastating detail: “Your correspondent was among the first upon the ground. A heart-sickening scene presented itself. Two dead Chinamen blown out of shape and beyond recognition, another in agonies of death, a fourth mortally wounded, and four others more or less injured were lying among the logs and debris of a completely demolished building." The bombing destroyed both workplace and dwelling space and fits the purge-era pattern of anti-Chinese terror carried out in the dark by perpetrators who were never identified.
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