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
Lee Chow Was Taken from Jail and Hanged by a Mob
1883-01-07Cheney, Washington • Lynching
After Chung Sow, a Chinese woman in Cheney, was found “literally hacked to pieces,” authorities arrested Lee Chow (also reported as Lee Gow) at Ritzville and lodged him in the Cheney jail. <i>Los Angeles Herald</i> and <i>The Idaho Statesman</i> reported that a mob of about eighty citizens broke the jail lock, seized him from custody, and “in ten minutes” he was “swinging to the limb of a neighboring pine." The guard “made no resistance.” Brief notices in papers from Fort Wayne, St. Louis, and Paxton repeated the same core account: a Chinese man accused of murdering and robbing a Chinese woman was taken from jail and hanged before he could be tried. By 1883, this case was very familiar to newspaper readers: a mob broke into a jail, abducted a prisoner, and hanged the prisoner in an act of vigilante justice. As was often the case, prison guards offered no resistance.
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