Eighty-eight percent of the lynchings occurred across 10 Southern states, according to “Lynching in America,” a 2017 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group out of Montgomery, Alabama.

The lynching era’s legacy can still be seen today, historians and politicians say. Three black senators introduced legislation this week to make lynchings a federal crime, saying it is long past due.

Stewart Tolnay, a sociology professor at University of Washington,  said states with the most lynchings now have higher homicide rates, increased imprisonments, more church burnings and a greater number of death penalty sentences.  

 “Data shows that lynchings created the underlying social conditions that create hate and racism today,” Tolnay said.

During the lynching era, E.M. Beck, a sociology professor at University of Georgia, said anger from the Civil War, competition for jobs and a rise of African-Americans as public figures led to increased violence against African-Americans.

“There was a rise in white supremacy to the point where whites did not view blacks as human, and also a generalized, widespread understanding that mob violence was necessary because of recent history,” Beck said.

African-American men were lynched for standing up against oppression, speaking to white women and committing minor social transgressions, according to the Lynching in America report. Of the lynchings recorded, a total of 25 percent of the people who were lynched were accused of sexually assaulting a white woman and 30 percent were accused of murder. 

Lynchings became public spectacles, as hundreds and even thousands of people would gather to watch, Beck and Tolnay both said. Local newspapers would advertise the events, and food and drink carts would be present as African-American men would be tortured for hours before finally being lynched.

“There was actually no anti-lynching legislation in place federally,” Tolnay said. “So the federal government, which was against lynchings for the most part, could not step in to stop them.” 

Many anti-lynching bills were proposed in the early 20th century, including the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1918, which passed through the U.S. House of Representatives, but was halted by a series of filibusters by Southern senators. The U.S. government did not apologize for the lack of anti-lynching legislation until 2005, but senators are currently pushing for an anti-lynching bill.  

U.S. Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) rolled out the bill, called the “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018,” this week. 

“Lynching is a dark, despicable part of our history, and we must acknowledge that, lest we repeat it,” Harris said in a press release. “From 1882 to 1986 there have been 200 attempts that have failed to get Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, it’s time for that to change.”

Jim Loewen, author of “Sundown Towns,” a book about American towns that refused to allow African-Americans to live in their communities, said African-Americans migrated to high-populated urban areas after the start of the lynching era.

Detroit and Cleveland, Ohio, saw a 42.5 percent and 36.8 percent increase in African-American population between 1910 and 1970, respectively, according to the lynching report. Jacksonville, Florida, saw a decrease of 28.5 percent.

This caused the competition for jobs to increase between the recently migrated African-Americans and the local white people, Loewen said. This angered some white Northerners, creating racial bias nearly as bad as some areas in the South.

“This wasn’t, and isn’t, just a Southern problem,” Loewen said.

Lynchings made their way to the North after the migration of African-Americans to urban cities, according to the report. A total of 89 lynchings were reported in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio during the lynching era.

Hate crimes against African-Americans are still occurring across the country, but they are most prominent in the Southern states and densely populated urban areas, according to the 2016 FBI hate crime statistics.

The number of reported lynchings decreased in the 1940s, and lynchings that did occur were less public and more private due to a more progressive society, according to the lynching report.

So that lynchings won’t be forgotten, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery in April. The memorial has signs, sculptures and art from the lynching era.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative,  said the memorial was created to educate people on America’s ugly past.

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape,” Stevenson said. “This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

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“The State of Hate” road trip is part of a larger reporting project called “Hate in America,” examining how hate is changing the nation.

The fellows on the three-week road trip will talk to Americans from all walks of life and across the fault-lines of political, economic and racial differences.

They are part of a 38-member team of News21 reporters, based at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. While other News21 fellows are mostly traveling this summer to major cities for interviews, the eight road-trip fellows have a different purpose: to explore the off-beaten paths and examine the state of hate in more secluded American towns and at some of the nation’s most iconic places.

Journalists Jim Tuttle and Alex Lancial are leading the three-week, 7,000-mile trek.

Fellows Catherine Devine, Brandon Bounds, Lenny Martinez Dominguez and Penelope Blackwell will cover the first leg of the road trip. They will travel through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. In Chicago on July 5, fellows Rosanna Cooney, Storme Jones, Shelby Knowles and Brittany Brown will take over the tour, doing interviews in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Side trips are likely.

Follow the News21 blog for updates as the team reports while on the road.

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The report also suggests that “law enforcement agencies hold public meetings about hate crimes and orientations with specific targeted communities, such as Muslims and immigrants.”

Although reported hate crimes have increased by more than 20 percent from 2014 to 2016 in California, law enforcement “has not been doing enough to identify, report, and respond to these crimes,” according to the report.

At least one California sheriff’s department says it is addressing the problem in a big way.

To bolster victim outreach, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is emphasizing to the immigrant communities that it isn’t concerned with their immigration status, and that officers will aid victims with validating their citizenship, said Detective Christopher Keeling, the hate crime coordinator for the sheriff’s department.

“The fact that you’re a victim and you’re assisting with the investigation … we will help you stay here,” Keeling said deputies tell immigrants who report hate crimes. “We will help you with your VISA because we want you here because you’re not the type of person that we think should be moving.”

State law prohibits law enforcement from detaining, reporting or turning over hate crime victims and witnesses to federal immigration authorities “as long as such individuals are not charged with or convicted of certain crimes under state law,” according to the Auditor’s report.

Keeling said there was a 19 percent drop in reported hate crimes in his 4,000 square mile jurisdiction from 2016 to 2017. There were 166 hate crimes reported in 2017 and 206 in 2016, according to an LASD document obtained by News21.

He traces the drop in the county’s hate crimes, in part, to underreporting.

Undocumented immigrants, more so than other victim groups, are increasingly deterred from working with law enforcement because they fear deportation, undermining the county’s hate crime data accuracy, Keeling said.

“We can’t protect what we don’t know,” Keeling said.

Keeling said one of his department’s goals is to prevent undocumented immigrants from becoming hate incident victims twice – once for the crime and twice for a system that fails to report and protect.

New pamphlets that explain what hate crimes are, the rights every victim has and why he or she shouldn’t be afraid to report, regardless of immigration status, have been designed, Keeling said. Once printed, all LASD sheriff’s stations will have them and deputies will hand them out in the community, he added.

“Immigration status is NOT a determining factor for assistance,” states an excerpt in the pamphlet obtained by News21.

The pamphlet contains California’s hate crime statute and explains the difference between hate crimes and hate incidents. It also emphasizes that both types of situations must be reported to law enforcement.

“Hate crimes and hate incidents MUST be reported in order to ensure proper documentation, investigation and prosecution,” an excerpt of the pamphlet states. “Not reporting these incidents to law enforcement only encourages perpetrators to continue to act on their beliefs and they will continue to pose a threat to our communities.”

But Keeling said the pamphlets alone won’t properly bolster hate crime reporting in undocumented communities stricken with fear; it takes one-on-one attention, constant outreach, and eventually a level of trust that produces more accurate numbers.

“They have to first see us an equal, as a friend, as a partner,” he said. “And that takes time. I get it.”

But advocates say more needs to be done to improve relations between officers and immigrants who are victims of hate crimes.

“We have women that come to our office that are literally are afraid – even with asylum – that (citizenship) can be taken away from them,” said Maria Roman, a transgender woman who is a board member of the TransLatin@ Coalition, a nonprofit which does advocacy work for trans Latina immigrants.

“I think that there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said.

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“There were snipers on roofs all around the park,” Woodson said. “There were blockades, police cars, all kinds of tanks — this overly-militarized police presence. All over downtown there were gangs of white supremacists roving together, yelling, chanting with flags and shields and sticks.”

On Aug. 12, white nationalists converged on the city for a “Unite the Right” rally. What started as a protest against the removal of Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments quickly turned violent as protesters clashed.

It started when gun-toting militia members gathered in Emancipation Park, formerly known as Lee Park, in anticipation of the rally’s noon start time. By 11 a.m., the City of Charlottesville had declared a state of emergency.

“Our town was overcome with people who had come to do war,” said Woodson. “They were here to yell. They were here to fight. They were here to kill, and all of those things happened.”

By the end of the day, three people lost their lives. Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates were killed when their helicopter crashed. The two Virginia State Police officers were on their way to assist law enforcement with the unfolding situation in Charlottesville.

A few blocks from Emancipation Park, authorities say an Ohio man drove his car into a group of counter-protesters near Charlottesville’s Historic Downtown Mall, taking the life of Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring 19 others.

Nearly a year later, signs of last August are still visible throughout the city.

On the backs of stop signs and on telephone poles, stickers can be found denouncing white supremacy and the alt-right.

Purple posters with “Heather” in white cursive font hang in shop windows along the mall.

The alley where the car attack happened has been renamed. What was previously a part of Fourth Street Northeast is now Heather Heyer Way.

A shrine to Heyer sits to one side of the street. Over time, people in passing have left flowers, candles and prayer cards. A watercolor painting sits propped up against the wall.

Messages written in chalk cover the bricks on either side of the street. The messages that haven’t faded yet read everything from “END WHITE SUPREMACY,” to “TEACH LOVE, NOT HATE.” In the middle of them all, larger than the rest, is “GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. HEATHER.”

This month, “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler received initial approval to hold a demonstration in Washington, D.C., on the one-year anniversary of last year’s rally. That was after the City of Charlottesville denied Kessler’s application for a second rally.

According to Woodson, the Charlottesville community is prepared this time.

“One of the things I have gathered is when someone shows you who they are, you believe them,” Woodson said. “And so when Jason Kessler shows us who he is, and those who follow him and perpetuate his ideology say they’re coming back, we’re going to believe them and prepare for that. We’re going to do so much in a better and healthy way that protects this community.”

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The incident launched a national debate about the treatment of Muslims in America, and if schools were being overzealous.

That case troubled two Rhode Island teachers who were determined to take action in their own community, especially after a local mosque was vandalized.

Stephanie Griffin, a special education teacher at Davisville Middle School in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, said incidents like the one in Texas signify a larger problem in the education system: a general lack of compassion, diversity and understanding. Griffin, along with social studies teacher Sandra Makielski, are hoping to combat hate in the classroom through a professional development day for teachers they created, called “Understanding the Muslim American Experience.”

The first day-long workshop held in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, on April 5 was open to all teachers from all levels and disciplines. It was the first in a series of professional development days aimed at educating teachers about the Muslim experience in America and how to integrate Islam into their classrooms, according to Makielski.

“It was really a tutorial of the basics of Islam,” Makielski said. “Before we can debate the ‘hot topics’ of Islam, we needed to understand Islam.”

Griffin agreed, adding: “One of the questions we were asked [at the professional development day] was: ‘Do you have a sizable Muslim community in your school?’ And, the truth is, we do not. But we don’t want our students to leave our school and act ignorantly because they weren’t given the education that taught them that Islam isn’t anything to be fearful of. We don’t want to be the teachers that continue to make this racism a problem.”

Over the course of the day, teachers from around the area met leaders from the Muslim community to get their thoughts about how to incorporate Islam into the curriculum – from teaching more in-depth about world religions to reading books featuring Muslim characters.

Angela Boisclair, a seventh-grade literary teacher who attended, said the workshop made her feel rejuvenated and re-energized as an educator.

“I can now incorporate more of the Muslim world into what I teach,” Boisclair said. “[The workshop] helped me to understand more about other cultures and appreciate that everyone is different.”

The workshop was held before the start of Ramadan – the holy month of fasting, introspection and prayer for Muslims – and Boisclair said the information she learned helped her at school. When a student in her class was observing the holiday, she now understood why he would want to spend his lunch period in the library instead of the cafeteria.

“Before the workshop, I may not have understood Ramadan to the extent I do now and the significance of fasting… Just like if I had not been brought up Christian, I wouldn’t fully understand Christmas,” said Boisclair. “What it comes down to is that Islam is a religion much like other religions that I have learned about or grew up practicing. As different as we all are, we are all the same.”

Makielski and Griffin are hoping to expand their initiative to other school districts around the state and throughout New England. But, the expansion goes beyond the Muslim experience as well.

“The workshop is helping to support people who feel that they have been ostracized in some way or another,” said Makielski. “Our focus happens to be Muslim, but much of what we’re going to be talking about is not limited to Muslims. We encourage teachers to be aware of social emotional learning.”

Makielski and Griffin’s workshop was funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Teaching Tolerance project, which has a wide variety of teacher-led initiatives around the country dedicated to reducing prejudice, improving intergroup relations and supporting equitable school experiences for our nation’s children.

While a day-long professional development day won’t solve racism in schools, it’s a stepping stone in the right direction, according to the Rhode Island teachers.

“We have to be responsible for our own learning communities,” said Griffin. “Because we are the first line of defense on ignorance.”

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About a month after the mass shooting, the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina Capitol, sparking a statewide and national debate to remove statues, flags and symbols of the Confederacy.

Three years later, the momentum has continued.

Local and state governments have removed at least 110 Confederate tributes and monuments since the 2015 attack in Charleston, according to an analysis published by the Southern Poverty Law Center this month. More than 1,700 symbols remain around the U.S., with many protected by state laws in former Confederate states, the report found.

“The conscience of the nation was pricked by that event,” Lecia Brooks, director of outreach at SPLC, said of the Charleston shooting. “It is time for us to have an honest conversation about what these monuments and memorials represent — it is not about heritage, it is about hate.”

The report found that there are currently 772 monuments in 23 states and Washington, D.C., with more than 300 in Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina. There are 100 public schools named for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or other Confederate figures and 80 counties and cities named after Confederate leaders, according to the report.

Brooks said SPLC did a national sweep to see the scope of the remaining Confederate monuments and collected data using online resources and contacts across the country.

Monuments and symbols should not be in public spaces because of what they represent and their removals are “past due,” she said.

“The memorials and monuments themselves and honoring of the veterans of the Confederate war were born out of white supremacy so it is a way to reinforce it and remind people, especially people of color and African-Americans in particular, that white supremacy reined,” Brooks said.

Activists pushing to remove these symbols and statues agree with the SPLC, while opponents argue that removing them erases history. Experts and historians that spoke to News 21 represented the divided opinions on the topic.

Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said there might be some areas where you can display them for historical purposes, but they should be removed from places of honor and public spaces.

SPLC excluded thousands of memorials located in historical settings, such as museums, battlefields and cemeteries, from its report.

“As a general rule, I think the government should not be honoring people whose main claim to fame is that they were in defense of slavery,” Somin said.

The removals since the Charleston massacre include 47 monuments and four flags, as well as name changes for 37 schools, seven roads, three buildings and seven parks, according to the SPLC report. Eighty-two removals were in former Confederate states with Texas leading the way with 31 removed, followed by 14 removed in Virginia.

But the removals have not been without controversy.

Last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s top general, triggered the Unite the Right rally where white nationalists stormed the college town with torches to protest the statue’s removal, and a rally left one person dead and dozens injured.  Federal hate crime charges were filed June 27 against an Ohio man accused of plowing his car into the counter-protesters.

Some have argued that violent protests will continue as monuments of the Confederacy are taken down. But Somin said that shouldn’t have any impact on the decision to remove them.

“If we do allow violent people to have a veto, that just encourages more violence — not only by neo-Confederates, but by extremist groups of all kinds, both right and left, who if they see that you can get your way by threatening violence then that just encourages more people to do it,” he said.

The report also names monument sponsors, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which has erected hundreds of statues since the Civil War.

United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of the Confederate Veterans did not respond to requests to comment for this story. A 2016 report by the SPLC said construction of monuments increased from 1900 through the 1920s, during the period of Jim Crow laws, and again in the 1950s-60s, during the civil rights movement.

Michele Bogart, a social history professor of public art, urban design and commercial culture at Stony Brook University in New York, said these monuments should not be removed because there is no inherent reason why people should assume that a monument, which she calls a historical artifact, is “a validation or celebration” of the Confederacy today.

“If you get rid of the monuments, you’re not going to solve the problem of structural racism in American society,” Bogart said. “You lose a sense of place and individual character and you lose a lot of local memory that is embodied in these works.”

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The Online Hate Index project out of the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, aims to identify hate speech, study its impact, and eventually design a plan to counteract hateful content.

Using artificial intelligence, teams of social scientists and data analysts are working to code programs that can search through thousands of posts looking for malicious content, said Claudia Von Vacano, executive director of digital humanities at Berkeley. Right now, the program correctly identifies about 85 percent of hate speech even though the project is in its early stages.

The software is used in connection with a problem-solving lab of experts, helping companies to navigate the line between protected free speech and content dangerously targeting marginalized groups, Von Vacano said.

The Online Hate Index started in 2012 by Brittan Heller, director of technology and society at the Anti-Defamation League, and Von Vacano.

It began by targeting hate speech on Reddit, the popular web forum. The project then attracted interest from companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook, which formed partnerships with the ADL and the D-Lab, and plan to use the online hate index on their platforms, Von Vacano said.

Daniel Kelly, assistant director of policy and programs for the Anti-Defamation League, explained that the ADL began working to fight online hate in 2014, when it released guidelines for companies hoping to limit damage done by extremists online. The Online Hate Index is an innovative project that is designed to target aspects of online hate that have been overlooked by similar studies, he said.

“What we are doing is using machine learning and social science to understand hate speech in a new way,” Kelly said. “We are taking it from the perspective of targets of hate online.”

Kelly said that the project aims to be transparent by lifting the “black veil,” when it comes to data and analytics from social media companies. Many companies keep their data and statistics private when it comes to terms of service and user policies. One of his main concerns about data coming from these companies, is that the ADL and D-Lab don’t know if these policies incorporate the perspectives of marginalized groups who are affected by them.

Both the D- Lab and ADL recruited members for their research teams with diverse perspectives and backgrounds, including varying ethnicities, genders, academic fields, and perspectives, said Von Vacano, who is also in charge of recruitment tor the Online Hate Index project.

“Our linguist, for example, is delving deeper into issues of threat,” Von Vacano said.

One of the largest challenges faced by the teams was defining the intensity of statements made by Reddit users, Von Vacano said, as hate speech is not clearly defined. To solve this problem, the ADL and D-Lab use a scale to characterize posts. At the first degree of biased posts, someone might hint at hateful opinions. Next, hateful content may become dehumanizing to a whole class of people. The most extreme examples of online hate are direct threats to individuals. Examples of online threats include doxing, where people with malicious intent publish information, like a home address or phone number, that puts someone in harms way and leaves them vulnerable for unwanted attention or visitors.

“Going into the project, we kind of naïvely thought that we could ingest large amounts of text and, at the other end, say on a binary level ‘this is hate… this is not hate,’ “Von Vacano said.
“At this point, we have a much more sophisticated understanding of hate speech as a linguistic phenomenon, and we are really dissecting hate speech as a construct with multiple components.”

In February 2018, the first stage of the project was completed, and more information can be found on the ADL’s website. Phase two is scheduled to be released in July.

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Hate crimes have increased since the November 2016 election, according to reports from the FBI.

Thirty-eight fellows are spending this summer examining nearly every aspect of hate for this year’s Carnegie-Knight News21 investigative journalism project titled “Hate in America.” The team is partnering and working with ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, which collects, researches and reports incidents.

The fellows, top students from journalism programs across the U.S. as well as Canada and Ireland, are reporting on racial and religious-based hate and taking a deeper dive into hate perpetrated online, on college campuses or against Native Americans and those in the LBGTQ community.

Fellows also are looking into hate crime laws in every state and analyzing public perception and tolerance of certain races and religions over time through data.

The newsroom is based in Phoenix, at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, but fellows will be on the road this summer, reporting across the U.S. They are talking to those who have experienced, witnessed, perpetrated and reported hate.

Veteran journalists Len Downie Jr. and Jacquee Petchel, the top editors for News21, selected this year’s topic, Hate in America, saying it was both important and timely.

“Much of the coverage of this subject has been localized or has been focused on one aspect of racism or prejudice,” said Downie, the former executive editor of The Washington Post.

“What we’re trying to do is something that’s national — both national in scope and national geographically — and encompassing the project as a whole,” Downie said.

The political atmosphere also makes Hate in America a timely topic, said Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and executive editor of News21.

“We went in this direction because there was so much controversy and turmoil among politicians, voters, advocacy groups about the tenor of the recent election,” Petchel said. “There were aspects of the election that polarized people who are extremely to the right or people who are extremely to the left.”

While the on-the-ground reporting takes place this summer, the project has been in the making for almost a year. Downie and Petchel chose the topic last fall. Fellows began their research and reporting in January, meeting weekly during the spring academic semester with Petchel, a professor at the Cronkite School, and Downie, the Cronkite School’s Weil Family Professor of Journalism.

News21, which launched in 2005, has won numerous awards in journalism competitions.

Downie said he and Petchel look for topics “where our investigative reporting is likely to bring up something new — original, enterprising investigative reporting by News21.”

Last year’s News21 investigative project was the safety of drinking water, in part because of problems with clean water in Flint, Michigan. Previous projects have looked at guns, food safety, voting rights and veterans’ issues.

“We’re always trying to shed light on a topical subject, in which there is more than one view on it,” Downie said.

Downie also sees News21 as having an advantage that many news organizations don’t have today.

“News21 can have somewhere between 20 and 40 reporters working on an investigative project in a concentrated effort,” he said.

Individual fellows are supported by their universities as well as by participating news organizations and philanthropists.

The fellows’ work on “Hate in America” will be published at hateinamerica.news21.com at the end of the summer, and by dozens of news organizations.

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