What does the Ohio Lynching Victims Memorial document about lynchings and their dates in the state?
Executive summary
The Ohio Lynching Victims Memorial, hosted by America’s Black Holocaust Museum, collects names, life-stories and the dates and places of lynchings to acknowledge and memorialize victims of racial terror; it launched online in December 2011 and remains a curated, public-facing record intended to “say their names” and note where and when they were terrorized and murdered [1] [2]. The memorial’s Ohio entries align with scholarly and community research showing at least 15–16 documented racial terror lynchings in the state between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, while also acknowledging that the recorded count is likely incomplete [3] [4] [5].
1. What the memorial records and how it frames dates
The memorial documents individual victims with biographical details, the location of the killing, and specific dates or years when known, presenting those dates as part of each person’s life story rather than as abstract statistics [1] [2]. For Ohio the memorial’s approach mirrors the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance work: collecting soil, erecting historical markers, and publishing research that ties victims to a particular date and site—practices used to fix lynching events in local memory and the public record [5] [6].
2. Examples and specific dates recorded for Ohio victims
The Ohio record as represented in memorials and local markers lists named victims and dates: Simeon Garnet was lynched in September 1877 and Henry Corbin in January 1892 in Oxford, Butler County [7] [8]. Henry Howard was lynched on June 19, 1885 in Coshocton County, a date now marked by a historical plaque and soil-jar ceremony [3] [9]. Christopher Davis’s lynching is memorialized as occurring in 1881, with a marker dedicated in Athens on the anniversary of that killing [10]. William Taylor of Sandusky is associated with an 1878 lynching and local soil-collection ceremonies [11]. The Springfield lynching of Richard Dickerson is recorded as March 7, 1904 [12]. Cleveland’s documented victim John Jordan was lynched on June 27, 1911 and is marked locally [4] [9]. Other named incidents, such as Charles “Click” Mitchell in 1897 (Urbana) and a cluster of late-19th-century events, appear in academic surveys and marker lists that the memorial references [13] [9].
3. Scope, counts, and ambiguity in dates
Sources consistently note a lower-bound estimate—roughly 15 documented lynchings in Ohio between about 1877 and 1950—while cautioning that the real number may be higher because records are incomplete and some victims remain unnamed [3] [5] [4]. National projects that the memorial relies on, like EJI’s research, track lynchings primarily within 1865–1950 and emphasize how many events lacked full contemporaneous documentation, which creates ambiguity about exact dates or even victim names in some counties [7] [5].
4. Purpose, partnerships, and potential agendas shaping the dates presented
The memorial’s documentation is shaped by partnerships with organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative and local Truth and Reconciliation projects that prioritize community-based research, historical markers, and the collection of soil from lynching sites to anchor dates and places in public memory—an explicitly restorative agenda that seeks reckoning rather than neutral cataloguing [5] [7] [6]. That mission explains why the memorial emphasizes named victims and precise dates where available, and why it highlights gaps: the project intends to spur community acknowledgement and institutional response as much as to compile a forensic inventory [2] [5].
5. Limits of the memorial’s Ohio chronology and what remains uncertain
While the memorial and allied projects establish specific dates for many Ohio lynchings and provide a documented minimum count, they also admit limits: not every killing is documented with full names or exact days, some spellings and details have been revised through later research, and historians warn the documented total understates the full extent of mob violence in Ohio [8] [5] [13]. The memorial therefore functions as both record and prompt—a verified chronology where evidence exists and an invitation to continue researching where gaps remain [1] [2].