This list has been prepared by Professor Michael J. Pfeifer, Faculty Member, American Social History, The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington 98505, tel: (360) 867-6009, e-mail: pfeiferm@evergreen.edu,
home page: http://academic.evergreen.edu/p/pfeiferm/home.htm

    This list is approximately complete.  Please cite this website if you use information from it.

    In this list of verified victims of lynching (referred to in at least one reliable primary source that I have identified, and if possible two or more independent primary sources; citations for sources are available on request), I use the definition of lynching that experts on mob violence devised at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1940: "there must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition," with a group defined as "three" or more persons.  For an insightful discussion of the historical problem of definition, see Christopher Waldrep, “Word and Deed: The Language of Lynching, 1820-1953,” in Michael Bellesiles, Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999).  I believe that the Tuskegee definition, while historically contingent and imperfect, remains useful to historians of the phenomenon.  Its emphasis on the collective, purposeful, ideological, lethal, and unlawful nature of lynching is in fact consistent with the popular usage of the term as well as the actual praxis of violence from the mid nineteenth century through the present day.  If more than one victim was lynched in the incident, they are listed separately, although much of the rest of the information will be identical.

    Incidents are listed by date, name given for victim, town or city, county, alleged offense, race or ethnicity, and type of mob (from W. Fitzhugh Brundage's classification scheme in Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 17-48, 291-292.  If information suggests the mob's composition was not exclusively white, this is indicated in parentheses.  I adapt Brundage's taxonomy with these general guidelines:  mass mobs evoked broad participation and approval, were spontaneous and possessed little if any formal organization, and were highly ritualized in practice. Posses were groups of men, sometimes authorized by the sheriff, who searched for fleeing suspects.  But these often large crowds occasionally killed the persons they were seeking to apprehend.  Posses could legally kill if suspects were armed or resisted arrest.  I have categorized collective killings perpetrated by search parties as lynchings only if victims were unarmed or did not attempt to avoid arrest after being located.  Two additional categories of mobs drew far less popular support. Private lynchings constituted secretive, small-scale but collective enactments of vengeance, often by relatives and friends of someone allegedly harmed by the mob's victim.  Terrorist mobs were long-lasting, well-organized groups that perpetrated extralegal violence, often for economic goals.

    A crucial source for the information listed below is William R. Hunt, Distant Justice: Policing the Alaska Frontier (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 254-258.  My gratitude also to Larry Lashway.
 
 

January 2, 1898, Millard Fillmore Tanner, Valdez, Murder, White, Unknown

October 26, 1899, Martin Severts, Lituya Bay (now in Glacier Bay National Monument, Gulf of Alaska), Murder and Murderous Assault, White, Unknown