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Fact check: How many lynchings were reported in the United States in 2022?
Executive Summary
The reviewed sources do not identify any incidents officially labeled as lynchings in the United States for 2022; federal hate-crime reporting from the FBI lists bias-motivated incidents but does not categorize any as lynchings, and news coverage around 2022 focused on the passage of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act rather than documenting current-year lynching counts. No source in the provided set reports a numeric total of lynchings in 2022, and the available federal statistics emphasize hate-crime incidents more broadly without using the historical term “lynching” in their 2022 dataset [1] [2].
1. Why the question mattered to reporters and lawmakers in 2022 — a law changed the frame
The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, signed in 2022, made lynching a federal hate crime, resolving a century-long gap in federal law and changing how future incidents could be prosecuted; coverage of that law explained historical context and possible applications to contemporary violent acts but did not present an annual lynching count for 2022 [1]. News articles about the law and related prosecutions instead described specific violent incidents and civil-rights-era history, aiming to clarify that while the statute creates a federal tool, it does not retroactively produce a simple yearly tally of lynchings for 2022 [3] [4]. The legislative focus shifted reporting toward legal definitions and prosecutorial reach rather than enumerating any lynchings in that year [1].
2. What the FBI’s 2022 hate-crimes data actually shows — numbers without the lynching label
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program documented 11,634 hate crime incidents in 2022, including offenses motivated by race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity, but the published materials and datasets do not classify incidents with the historical label “lynching.” The FBI releases incident-level categories for hate crimes and related offenses, yet the term “lynching” is absent from the 2022 hate-crime framework, so direct comparison or extraction of a lynching count from that dataset is not possible based on the provided reports [2] [5]. Advocacy groups and civil-rights entities pointed to increases in reported bias incidents, stressing reporting gaps rather than declaring lynchings for 2022 [6] [7].
3. Why advocates and some journalists raised the question — classification and reporting gaps
Civil-rights organizations and some journalists argued that contemporary acts of mob violence or race-motivated killings can meet modern definitions of lynching even if not recorded under that historical term, and they urged improved reporting and classification by law enforcement agencies. The Southern Poverty Law Center and Arab American Institute highlighted higher counts of hate-motivated incidents in 2022 and urged better data collection, suggesting the absence of a lynching label in federal statistics could obscure how legally and culturally analogous events are recorded [6] [7]. These sources framed the issue as one of legal terminology and reporting practice rather than a denial of contemporary racially motivated violence [1].
4. Where the public record remains ambiguous — specific incidents vs. formal labels
News stories covering 2022 documented violent hate crimes and prosecutions, such as cross burnings and bias-motivated assaults, which commentators sometimes invoked when discussing modern parallels to lynching, but those incidents were prosecuted under existing hate-crime laws or other statutes, not as federally labeled “lynchings.” The recent reporting emphasized that the Emmett Till Act creates a formal federal lynching offense going forward, potentially changing how future incidents are classified, but it did not retroactively relabel prior 2022 incidents as lynchings in the official statistics reviewed here [3] [4] [1].
5. Bottom line: available sources provide no official 2022 lynching tally
Across law-enforcement data and the news pieces provided, no authoritative count of lynchings in 2022 is presented; the FBI’s hate-crime releases enumerate bias-motivated incidents but do not use the term lynching, and reporting around the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in 2022 explained the law without asserting a specific number of lynchings that year [2] [1]. Readers seeking a definitive figure should note that the absence of the term in federal 2022 datasets means that deriving a lynching count would require reclassification of reported incidents or new prosecutorial labeling under the 2022 statute.
6. What to watch next — how the new law could change reporting and future tallies
With the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act now on the books, prosecutors and federal agencies may label future applicable cases as lynchings, which would produce clearer annual tallies going forward; analysts should track how law enforcement applies the new statute and whether the FBI or other federal reporting systems update categories to include lynching explicitly. Advocacy groups’ calls for improved data collection signal a likely push to see future hate-crime reports reflect the new federal offense, meaning that the first clear, officially labeled counts of lynchings under federal law are more likely to appear in post-2022 datasets [1] [6].