Lives, Not Metadata: Recovery Methods for Digital Histories of Racial Violence

This article discusses new digital research projects by historians, sociologists, and legal scholars that recover previously unrecorded cases of racist violence in the twentieth century and bring them into public view for the first time. New cases are expanding current understandings of the past by documenting lynchings, racially motivated homicides, police killings, church bombings, and nonlethal types of violence that have targeted multiple racial and ethnic groups. Early findings from these projects show that we only have a glimpse into widespread practices of racial terror in the United States. I argue for collecting broader sets of data about victims, surviving relatives, aggressors, and events in the aftermath of violence, because doing so will create new possibilities for studying widespread historical trauma, institutional traces of racist violence, and public understanding of increasingly urgent historical lessons. To keep the humanity of victims central to recovery efforts, I suggest that researchers can learn from community preservation and memorialization practices.