The project began in spring 2017. From the beginning, we worked with descendant communities to write about the victims and the violence. They told us to focus on more than the murder or attempted murder and remember the victims as men, women, and children who worked, loved, and lived fully as human beings.  The goal was not to avoid telling about the crimes–“the truth is brutal,” as the cousin of one victim told us–but to ensure the memory was honest and complete. This focus prompted us to avoid publishing pictures of lynched bodies, believing they were unnecessary to capture the story of victims’ lives. 

Our focus on student education and initiative has been constant. As of 2025, over 200 students have worked on the project, many for multiple years, and MA and Ph.D students have made the history of racial violence in the state their research concentration. The class served as the inspiration for History of Us, the first Black history class taught daily in public school in Alabama, and more recently for civil rights curricula for middle schools. 

We are constantly revising our research to reflect new stories from descendant families, new databases, and new technologies to record, preserve, and present the information. We began with 364 reported lynchings in the state. Since 2017, we have identified over 400 more cases of lynching in Alabama. Focusing on Black women as victims, we had an initial total of 17 cases and currently have more than 60. 

We update the initial dataset annually with lynchings and attempted lynchings newly uncovered by our project.