A table titled "Lynchings: By Year and Race" lists for the year 1919: Whites 7, Blacks 76, Total 83. At the bottom it notes: "*Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute." This table covers the years 1882–1968 and gives annual counts of lynchings broken down by race.

The Red Summer of 1919 described the catastrophic racial violence that unfolded during the months of demobilization. At least 25 episodes of racial unrest occurred nationwide, often involving white backlash to Black veterans or Black workers in war industries. At least 100 lynchings were reported while the U.S. was at war, and an estimated 83 followed in 1919.

The term "Red Summer," coined by James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, refers to a series of more than three dozen geographically dispersed race riots, lynchings, and other violent attacks targeting African Americans in 1919. Initially for my own benefit, I tracked the dates, locations, and types of violent events on a spreadsheet. As the summer progressed, I added columns for data like number of deaths or motivating factors. [context: this AHA article describes the NAACP role and archival work but does not itself give a specific figure of “seventy” Black people lynched; it instead treats lynchings as part of the broader wave of violence.]

The table "Lynchings: By Year and Race" reproduced on this page shows for 1919: Whites 7, Blacks 76, Total 83. A note below the table states: "*Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute." The table spans 1882–1968 and presents annual lynching numbers by race.

In addition, Haynes reported that between January 1 and September 14, 1919, white mobs lynched at least 43 African Americans, with 16 hanged and others shot; and another 8 men were burned at the stake. Haynes noted that lynchings were a national problem. As President Wilson had noted in a 1918 speech: from 1889 to 1918, more than 3,000 people had been lynched; 2,472 were black men, and 50 were black women.

During the Red Summer of 1919, anti-Black riots erupted in 25 major American cities, including Houston, Texas; East St. Louis and Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Nebraska; Elaine, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Charleston, South Carolina. White mobs intent on protecting their economic and social dominance from growing communities of Black workers attacked Black communities, destroyed property, and killed or injured **hundreds of Black people**. [context: Equal Justice Initiative describes the scale of killings and injuries but does not give a precise lynching count such as “seventy Black people”; it emphasizes that hundreds of Black people were killed overall in riots and related violence.]

Many were killed and injured as African Americans, some of them soldiers, fought fiercely to protect their homes and families. Seventy-two people were lynched in 1919 alone.

"At the national level, there are three data sets that have attempted to be comprehensive: the Chicago Tribune, NAACP, and Tuskegee Institute inventories." The article explains that these original data sets, including Tuskegee’s, had significant errors and that Tolnay and Beck created a verified data set by checking local newspapers. It reports that when combined with Tolnay-Beck data, the authors record 4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941, and notes that their comparison with Tuskegee’s Texas data finds additional lynchings not in Tuskegee and some inaccuracies in the Tuskegee inventory.

Lynchings increased from 64 in 1918 to 83 in 1919. It’s impossible to say exactly how many people were killed or injured in the race riots and lynchings of the Red Summer of 1919—official records for some incidents were poor or never documented.

From May to September 1919, more than two dozen incidents of racialized violence took place throughout the United States. Blood flowed in small towns like Elaine, Arkansas, in medium-size places such as Annapolis, Maryland, and Syracuse, New York, and in big cities like Washington and Chicago. Hundreds of African American men, women and children were burned alive, shot, hanged or beaten to death by white mobs.

Hundreds of African American men, women and children were burned alive, shot, hanged or beaten to death by white mobs. Researchers believe that in a span of 10 months, more than 250 African Americans were killed in at least 25 riots across the U.S. by white mobs that never faced punishment. All told, at least 1,122 Americans were killed in racial violence over those six years, by Tuttle’s count.

"According to the Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States: 3,437 Negro and 1,293 white." The unit notes that "The numbers of lynchings listed in each source varies slightly. The NAACP lynching statistics tend to be slightly higher than the Tuskegee Institute figures, which some historians consider ‘conservative.’" As an example, for 1914, it states that Tuskegee reported 52 lynchings, the Chicago Tribune reported 54, and The Crisis (NAACP) gave the number as 74.

The Red Summer was a pattern of white-on-black violence that occurred in 1919 throughout the United States. In addition to those suffering these political and legal injustices, thousands of African Americans were hanged, burned to death, shot to death, tortured, and driven from their homes. The bloodiest incident occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, where it is estimated that over 100 African Americans were killed.

This timeline shows the lynchings and riots that occured during the Red Summer of 1919. Actual lynching numbers that summer could be much higher than contemporaneous reports, as many lynchings were not documented or were misreported in local records.

The article describes efforts to count lynchings: "Efforts to count the number of lynchings in the country go back at least to 1882, when The Chicago Tribune began publishing each January a list of all executions and lynchings in the previous year. The Tuskegee Institute began releasing a list in 1912, and in 1919, the N.A.A.C.P. published what its researchers said was a comprehensive list of lynchings in the previous three decades." It adds that later scholarly work by Tolnay and Beck and new inventories have found hundreds more lynchings than earlier lists, showing that the older data sets were incomplete.

The Equal Justice Initiative report notes that the research collected at Tuskegee University and the work of E.M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay "are widely viewed as the most comprehensive collection of research data on the subject of lynching in America." It states: "EJI has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported." This indicates that traditional counts such as Tuskegee’s understate the true number of racially motivated lynchings.

Between January 1 and September 14, 1919, white mobs lynched at least 43 African Americans, according to an estimate by George Edmund Haynes, co-founder of the National Urban League and an economist who served in President Wilson’s administration. Haynes also counted at least 25 race riots in 1919, with more than 250 African Americans killed by white mobs across the country.

Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-Black riots and lynchings swept the country for eight months. Sept. 28, 1919: The Omaha Courthouse Lynching and Riot ... A white mob of between 5,000 to 15,000 lynched African American Will Brown. The Army arrested mob leaders but no one was successfully prosecuted.

Between the turbulent months of April and October 1919, racial violence reached a peak in the United States. Some twenty-six white-on-black massacres took place across the country. Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dubbed this terrible period the Red Summer as a way to characterize pervasive racial hostility and for the blood spilled in its wake.

Discussing differences among major lynching data sets, the article notes: "The Tuskegee data report 52 lynchings; the Tribune data, 54; and the NAACP, 74." It uses this example (for a specific year) to show that Tuskegee’s figures are generally lower than NAACP’s and that the three inventories do not fully agree, motivating efforts to converge them into a single national database.

The description explains that the map "LYNCHINGS BY STATES AND COUNTIES IN THE UNITED STATES 1900 TO 1931" uses "data compiled by the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute." A table on the map lists lynching tallies by state for this period, illustrating Tuskegee’s systematic collection of lynching statistics in the early twentieth century.

This archival record is described as "Record of lynchings in Alabama from 1871 to 1920, compiled for the Alabama Department of Archives and History by the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute." It demonstrates Tuskegee’s role as a primary compiler of lynching data for at least one state during the period that includes 1919.

At least 38 people were killed and thousands of Black homes were looted and damaged during Red Summer. The riot was one of twenty "race riots" across the nation during the so-called Red Summer, but was distinguished by strong and organized Black resistance to white violence.

Between 1889 and 1922, a total of 3,436 people were lynched in the United States; 3,038 of them were Black. This broader context underscores the scale of racial terror surrounding the Red Summer period, though these figures span multiple decades, not just 1919.