Warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of violence.

For more than 300 years, major segments of our nation—oftentimes with the full support and backing of our government, including federal, state and local governments and law enforcement—have advanced the corrosive and twisted cause of white supremacy. These efforts have taken many forms, far too numerous to document here. But, unmistakably, these efforts have included systemic and institutionalized violence against the Black community to assert white superiority and Black inferiority. No campaign was more evil, nor more cruelly effective, than terror lynchings between 1887 and 1950.