Draft:The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) is a collection of official records and first-hand accounts, pertaining to racialized violence and anti-Black killings in the Jim Crow South. The Archive contains information on almost 1,000 cases of racially-motivated killings of African American men, women and young people, largely in the former Confederate states.

These records, some hitherto lost in the annals of history or previously unreported, offer users the opportunity to discover how violence affected peoples’ lives, defined legal rights, and shaped contemporary politics.

The Archive contains documents and materials from cases which occurred in former Confederate states, dating from 1930-1954, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing public school segregation. Cases have been researched and recorded by Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project students, as well as the project’s lead historian and CRRJ attorneys, from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

These records are maintained by the Digital Scholarship Group at the Northeastern Library.

The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive's Beginnings

Founded by Professor Margaret Burnham, Director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chancellor Melissa Nobles, the Archive was built as a resource for identifying and classifying these fatal, racially motivated crimes. The Archive has been actively collecting cases for more than 15 years and their work is not complete.

Crimes of the Civil Rights Era and The Emmett Till Civil Rights Cold Case Act

CRRJ held a conference titled “Crimes of the Civil Rights Era” in 2007 at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Massachusetts. Following discussions at this event, which reunited veterans of the 1960s-era civil rights movement and attracted many scholars, lawyers, and journalists, including Congressman Bennie Thompson (MS), Senator Doug Jones (AL), Rita Bender and Manning Marable, it became clear that many cases of anti-Black violence had historically been mishandled by law enforcement officials, prosecutors and courts.

After the passing of the Emmett Till Civil Rights Cold Case Act in 2008, the work of shedding light on this history became possible.

Nobles, then a professor of political science at MIT, and Burnham began to collect materials on cases of anti-Black homicides beyond the scope of the Till Act. During this research, it became apparent that hundreds of incidents had never been investigated. They began the rewarding but arduous work of scouring through newspapers, court documents, police reports, medical examiner records and many other types of documentation to fill in the blanks in many of these cases.

They also began contacting descendants of these victims. Families and relatives, who could be identified using resources like ancestry.com, have worked alongside CRRJ since the beginning, in the hope of achieving restorative justice for their murdered loved one.

In 2009, this investigative and archival process was handed over to law students, graduate students in journalism, and undergraduates, under the supervision of Burnham and other CRRJ attorneys in CRRJ’s annual Spring Clinic. About four hundred students have worked on the project thus far, almost 1,000 cases of anti-Black killings are recorded in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, the construction of which was made possible by generous support from the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Scope of the Archive

The archive contains documents on more than 1,000 cases, and the majority can be defined as lynchings, according to the the prevailing National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) definition of lynchings, which noted four conditions:

1. Evidence that the victim was deceased
2. Evidence that the victim was killed illegally
3. Evidence that three or more people had participated in the killing
4. Evidence that the victim was killed illegally by a “group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.”

Often, the perpetrator(s) are unknown, and in some cases there are fewer than three known perpetrators involved.

The Archive also deals with cases beyond the NAACP's definitions and explores those that involve deaths at the hands of law enforcement officials.

Many deaths occurred while the victims was in the custody of a law enforcement officer. In these instances, many officers either participated in the violence directly, or failed to protect victims from fatal violence. In some cases, officials justified their violence as “self-defense,” despite evidence to the contrary of those claims. And in other incidents, county sheriffs often deputized civilian groups as “posses” or vigilante groups. Without fear of legal repercussions, white citizens were free to commit violent acts against Black citizens with impunity.

Updates to the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive

In November 2023, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project’s archival team released a map feature on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.

CRRJ’s dedicated archivists, designers, developers and historians produced this interactive heat-map as a visualization of racialized violence between 1930 and 1954, and can be used to understand how this violence shaped American life for African Americans during that period.