Chinese Red Record
Documenting the history of anti-Chinese lynchings, riots, and massacres
in the American West (1850 – 1915)
What Is Chinese Red Record?
Chinese Red Record is a scholarly archive of anti-Chinese lynchings and related racial terror. It traces how lynchings, riots, massacres, expulsions, and exclusion worked together to drive Chinese communities from mining camps, railroad towns, river ports, and cities across the American West and beyond.
Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of documented lynchings, digitized newspaper archives, maps, and structured records, the archive reconstructs how violence spread across regions and how newspapers, law, and politics helped nationalize anti-Chinese racial terror.
The interactive maps, timelines, and charts presented here translate the dissertation's quantitative and spatial arguments into web form. Where possible, the visualizations correspond directly to the thesis, The Chinese Red Record: Western Lynch Law and the Nationalization of Racial Terror, 1853-1915.
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Featured Record
Willie Wong Was Killed by a Mob After His Acquittal
1904-08-00Avon, Mississippi • Lynching
In August 1904, Willie Wong, a Chinese merchant in Avon, Mississippi, was killed by a Black mob after a white jury acquitted him of murdering a Black man. <i>The Boston Globe</i> reported that the verdict caused “great indignation among the negroes” and that a mob later “went to Wong’s house at night and killed him.” The paper added that several participants were arrested, making this one of the rare southern anti-Chinese lynchings in which newspapers also mentioned arrests. <i>The Boston Globe</i> framed this incident as a “new race war.” The Time Herald (D.C.) cautioned the “people who are preaching lynching down there ought to remember what an imitative cuss man is."
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