Keeping the Red Record: The Project

The Racial Violence Archive (RVA) is one of several projects gathering and sharing information related to racist violence in U.S. history, and keeping with a long tradition of documenting atrocity. The RVA collection focuses on terroristic acts (i.e., intimidation, violence, and reprisal used to create fear and control behavior) targeting African Americans in the 20th century U.S. South and aims expand to incorporate other aspects of racialized political violence.

The RVA incorporates and extends related collections, such as national data on lynching compiled by historical and contemporary activists and scholars. By keeping what Ida B. Wells (1895) called "The Red Record," helping document racist violence from the era of lynching and since, and making data, research, and engagement more accessible, the RVA aims to support scholarship, teaching, and advocacy addressing the well documented contemporary legacies of racist violence.

Event Records: Data and Limitations

The RVA's event database compiles previously published accounts and original research in a digital archive. The archive is in essence a collection of collections where event histories are aggregated from various sources, including newspapers and periodicals, published academic works (e.g., monographs and compilations), organizational records (e.g., SNCC, NAACP), affidavits, and government reports.

Collection efforts began with a focus on the states of Mississippi and North Carolina in the Civil Rights Movement period (ca. 1955-1975), documenting nearly two thousand incidents of violence – murders, assaults, bombings, cross-burnings, police brutality, etc. – in those states over these two decades. Data collection has expanded to include other U.S. states and regions, and to include earlier 19th and 20th century events.
Picture
The 1898 Wilmington, NC racial massacre and coup began at the offices of the Wilmington Daily Journal, an African American newspaper. The mob standing for this photo clearly shows officials among perpetrators of that pogrom. Photo credit: Columbia Alumni Review

A Public History Initiative

RVA works with students, researchers, community organizations, policy makers, artists, and others to understand and address  historical racial violence, its legacies, and remedy today. Publicly accessible online features enable users to view some archival event information and learn about related efforts.

Acknowledgements

Support for this research has been provided by the National Science Foundation, The University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and by the Mellon Foundation (VRT Project). Special thanks to many academic and broader community collaborators nationwide and undergraduate and graduate research assistants and collaborators at UC Irvine, Washington University in St. Louis, and elsewhere who have contributed to this work. Thanks as well to the Humanities Digital Workshop and Olin Library Data Services at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Related Digital Projects

The Racial Violence Archive is one of many digital projects facilitating understanding and reckoning with legacies of racist violence in the U.S. and worldwide. Learn more about some of these related initiatives at the project sites below (click to open web pages):