Racial Violence and Noose Incidents in Southern Schools

Throughout the 1990s, documented incidents of nooses hung in schools, workplaces, and public spaces targeting Black Americans persisted across the South and nationally. The FBI's hate crime statistics program, established under the 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act, recorded hundreds of race-based incidents annually. In 1998, James Byrd Jr.'s lynching in Jasper, Texas underscored continuing white supremacist terror.