How many lynchings in Ohio are named on national memorials and which victims remain unidentified?
Executive summary
The Equal Justice Initiative’s research and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice record that Ohio has at least 15 documented racial-terror lynching victims whose deaths are recognized on national remembrance projects (this figure is cited in EJI and multiple local reports) [1] [2]. Local and state memorial efforts — including the America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s Ohio Lynching Victims Memorial and EJI’s Community Remembrance Project markers — name a subset of those victims by place and person, while acknowledging that many more perpetrators and victims remain unrecorded and unnamed in the historical record [3] [4].
1. Ohio’s tally on national memorials: a documented minimum of 15
EJI’s nationwide accounting, which undergirds the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, identifies Ohio as having 15 documented victims of racial-terror lynching between roughly 1877 and 1950; that tally is repeated in reporting about the memorial and in EJI outreach about county markers and soil-jars collected from lynching sites [1] [5] [2]. The National Memorial displays county cases and inscribes victims’ names on suspended steel columns; reporting on the memorial specifically notes that Ohio’s research produced 15 names to be represented [1].
2. Who is named: some locally known victims and the limits of the list
Local Community Remembrance Project work documents and memorializes specific Ohio victims by name: for example, Simeon Garnet and Henry Corbin (lynched in Oxford/Butler County) were memorialized with a historical marker and soil collection in partnership with EJI [4] [6], Henry Howard of Coshocton County is explicitly named on a marker and in EJI materials [2], and William Taylor (Sandusky) and Christopher Davis (Athens) have been the subjects of local remembrance efforts and reporting [7]. Cincinnati‑area reporting highlights six victims from the greater Cincinnati area among those represented at the national memorial, though local accounts vary about which names appear on which county panels [1]. America’s Black Holocaust Museum hosts an Ohio Lynching Victims Memorial online that gathers life stories and names for many of these victims, reflecting an effort to compile and publish the documented list [3] [8].
3. The unidentified: admitted gaps and unnamed victims
EJI and partner communities explicitly warn that their lists are minimum counts and that “many of the names of lynching victims were not recorded and will never be known,” language echoed in EJI press materials and local marker narratives—meaning that the 15 documented Ohio victims are almost certainly an undercount of total lives terrorized or killed by lynching in the state [4] [9]. Nationally, EJI’s broader dataset documents thousands of racial‑terror lynchings and notes cases where victims’ identities were not recorded; Ohio’s public memorial projects follow that same caveat when naming victims [5] [4].
4. What “named on national memorials” practically means
Being “named on national memorials” takes two forms in the Ohio context: EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice includes county-level monuments that bear the names of documented victims gathered by EJI’s research, and local Community Remembrance Project markers and museum exhibits (including ABHM’s online memorial) place those names and stories back into community spaces [1] [3] [4]. The memorial architecture therefore links a minimum documented count (15 for Ohio) to both a national exhibit and a series of local markers; it does not—and cannot—claim to recover every victim whose name was erased from surviving records [1] [4].
5. Where reporting is silent and what remains to be established
While the sources consistently report “at least 15” documented Ohio victims and list several named individuals (Garnet, Corbin, Howard, Taylor, Davis among them), comprehensive, source-backed rosters tying every named Ohio victim to specific panels at the national memorial are not provided in the available reporting; therefore a definitive, sourced list of all 15 individual names as they appear on national installations cannot be produced from these sources alone [1] [4] [3]. Researchers and communities acknowledge both named victims and an indeterminate number who remain unidentified due to gaps in contemporary record‑keeping [4].