Which states have the highest rates of reported lynchings since 2020?
Executive summary
There is no authoritative dataset in the supplied reporting that measures “lynchings since 2020,” so the question cannot be answered directly from these sources; the available material instead documents historical patterns and a few high-profile modern incidents, and identifies southern states with the highest historical rates of lynching (Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana) [1] [2] [3]. The reporting does note isolated modern crimes framed as lynchings — for example, the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia — but it does not supply a systematic, state-by-state rate-of-lynching series for 2020–2025 [3].
1. Historical context and which states top long-term lists
Long-term tabulations compiled by civil-rights researchers and historical archives point to a cluster of Southern states as having the highest historical rates of lynching: Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana are identified by the Equal Justice Initiative as having the highest statewide rates, and Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana appear among the states with the largest absolute numbers of lynchings in the classic Tuskegee/NAACP tallies [1] [2] [3]. The NAACP cites Mississippi as having the single highest count (581 recorded lynchings in the studied period), with Georgia second and Texas third in absolute numbers [3]. These sources document the geographic concentration of lynching as a form of racial terror in the post-Reconstruction South [1] [4].
2. What the supplied sources actually measure — and what they don’t
The core datasets in the provided reporting (Tuskegee, EJI, NAACP, archival compilations) catalog lynchings primarily between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century, and some extend through 1950 or into the 1960s; they are explicit about their temporal scope and methodology [5] [4] [1]. None of the supplied sources offers a comprehensive, comparable national time series or rate metric expressly beginning in 2020 or covering 2020–2025, so they cannot be used to rank states by “reported lynchings since 2020” [5] [1].
3. Modern incidents mentioned in the reporting and why they are not a rate
The supplied material references a few modern crimes that commentators have linked to the legacy of lynching — for example, James Byrd’s 1998 murder in Jasper, Texas, and Ahmaud Arbery’s killing in February 2020 near Brunswick, Georgia — but these are presented as notable incidents rather than as evidence of a continuing national rate that can be tabulated by state over a recent multi-year window [3]. Such individual cases are consequential for public memory and criminal justice, but the sources do not claim they represent an ongoing pattern measured across states since 2020 [3].
4. Why historical patterns matter but can’t substitute for current rates
The historical concentration of lynchings in former-Confederate states — where researchers found higher counts and higher per-capita rates in Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana — explains why scholars point to those states in discussions of racial terror’s legacy, and why contemporary reckonings frequently focus there [1] [2]. However, a state’s historical rate is not equivalent to a measured contemporary rate of extrajudicial mob killings since 2020; the supplied reporting does not provide post-2019 systematic surveillance or state-by-state tallies to support that claim [1] [2].
5. Conclusion and where to look next for an empirical answer
Based on the supplied sources, one can say which states had the highest historical rates (Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana) and which had the largest historical totals (Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana) [1] [3]. The supplied reporting does not contain data that would permit ranking states by “reported lynchings since 2020”; a definitive contemporary answer would require consulting current federal or state crime statistics, hate-crime databases, civil-rights organization incident trackers, and updated EJI or academic research explicitly covering 2020–present — sources not included among the materials provided [2] [3].