January 1882

Ida B. Wells's research, corroborated by Chicago Tribune records, documented 728 lynchings in 1882 and 728 in 1883 — the peak years. Over 700 additional lynchings occurred across the remaining 1880s. The victims were predominantly Black men across the former Confederacy and border states. Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia recorded the highest totals. Fewer than 1% of perpetrators faced any legal consequence.

Georgia leased Black convicts to turpentine operators across the coastal plain. Men worked year-round in isolated pine forests, denied shoes, food, and medical care. State inspectors documented whipping, torture, and murder. The 1895 Dade Coal Mine lease alone saw over 100 convict deaths from explosion and neglect. Georgia's convict lease revenue surpassed $350,000 by 1897.

Black landowners who acquired property during Reconstruction face dispossession through fraudulent tax sales, forged deeds, and violent intimidation. Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia counties record rapid transfer of Black-owned farmland to white owners through sheriff's sales and disputed inheritance. Economic success itself provokes violence.

Black landowners who acquired property during Reconstruction face systematic dispossession through fraudulent tax sales, forged deeds, and violent intimidation. In Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, counties record rapid transfer of Black-owned farmland to white owners through sheriff's sales, disputed inheritance claims, and outright seizure. The Thomas Moss lynching in Memphis in 1892 will be paradigmatic: economic competition, not crime, drives the violence.

Black landowners who acquired property during Reconstruction face dispossession through fraudulent tax sales, forged deeds, and violent intimidation. Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia counties record rapid transfer of Black-owned farmland to white owners through sheriff's sales and disputed inheritance claims. Economic success itself provokes violence, as the Thomas Moss lynching of 1892 exemplifies.