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Which states have the highest rates of lynching in the USA as of 2025?
Executive Summary
As of the available analyses, there is no authoritative dataset showing “rates of lynching” in the United States for 2025; historical compilations identify Southern states—especially Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama—as having the highest documented totals of racial terror lynchings from the late nineteenth century through mid-twentieth century, but those figures describe a historical record, not current-year rates [1] [2] [3]. Recent projects and maps maintained by historians and advocacy groups update and visualize those historical tallies (including updates noted in early 2025), yet the sources explicitly caution that they do not measure present-day criminal killings or contemporary “lynching rates” and therefore cannot support claims about which states have the highest lynching rates in 2025 [4] [3].
1. How history is counted — revealing the states that dominate the historical record
Historical datasets compiled by researchers and organizations show clear, consistent patterns: Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama appear at the top of documented lynching totals for the period roughly 1877–1950, with individual projects citing totals that place Mississippi highest in many tallies [1] [2]. These sources aggregate documented incidents from archives, newspapers, coroner reports, and local histories; they are not claims about contemporary criminal statistics but are attempts to reconstruct the extent of racial terror during Jim Crow and Reconstruction-era backlash. The Equal Justice Initiative and Tuskegee-derived compilations form the backbone of this historical count, and recent maps visually emphasize county- and state-level concentrations that match longstanding scholarly consensus [3] [5].
2. Why “rates” and “counts” are different questions — methodological limits
Counting historical lynchings yields absolute totals, but public discussion often demands a “rate” (incidents per population or per year), which changes interpretation and requires reliable denominators and timeframes. The provided analyses show datasets with long historical spans (e.g., 1882–1968 or 1877–1950) that present totals rather than normalized rates, and analysts warn these cannot be applied to 2025 without additional contemporary data [1] [6]. Furthermore, historical documentation is incomplete and biased by underreporting, so state rankings by raw counts are useful for establishing where racial terror was most concentrated historically but not as precise measures of the full historical burden or any present-day phenomenon [4] [3].
3. Recent updates and why they don’t equate to modern lynching statistics
Several projects updating historical maps and tallies issued new visualizations or updates through early 2025, and they clarify their scope as historical: for example, an Equal Justice Initiative map and related resources were noted as updated in February 2025, and other archival maps and documents have been republished or annotated into 2025, emphasizing historical redress and memorialization rather than tracking contemporary violent crime trends [4] [3]. Congressional statements and recent criminal cases invoke this legacy to contextualize contemporary racial violence, but those statements and contemporary prosecutions address individual modern crimes and policy responses — they do not constitute a national, standardized “lynching rate” metric for 2025 [7].
4. Diverse perspectives: scholarship, advocacy, and political framing
The sources include academic reconstructions, advocacy-driven projects, and political statements; each has distinct aims. Scholarly and archival projects aim to document and map historical injustice with as much rigor as possible and publish caveats about scope and limits [8] [3]. Advocacy organizations use these findings to support memorialization, reparative measures and policy change, emphasizing the human toll and legacy of racial terror [2]. Political actors may cite specific recent killings or historical totals to argue for legislative action; those citations connect past and present rhetorically but do not transform historical tallies into present-day statistical measures [7] [6].
5. Bottom line for the original question and what would be needed to answer it for 2025
The accurate answer to “which states have the highest rates of lynching in the USA as of 2025” is: no reliable contemporary statistic labeled ‘lynching rate’ for 2025 exists in the cited analyses; the best-supported factual claim is that historically the highest documented totals occur in certain Southern states, notably Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama [1] [2] [3]. To answer the 2025 question properly would require a contemporaneous, federally standardized definition of “lynching,” a national incident database for 2025-level killings meeting that definition, and population-normalized calculations — none of which are provided in the supplied analyses [1] [4].