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By combing through contemporaneous newspapers as well as official records, the Equal Justice Initiative added 700 victims to the list of more than 3,200 African Americans already known to have been lynched between 1877 and 1950.

And that's just in the 12 Southern States studied from Texas to Virginia. The initiative wants to commemorate the now corrected record by placing markers at some of the lynching sites.

But most important says law professor Brian Stevenson and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, it seeks to reclassify the great Northward migration of African Americans as an exodus of refuge from terrorism.

There was an awareness that if you were white and you were offended by some person of color not just victimized with a crime but offended, you had the latitude to respond to that in any way you wanted.

And if that included lethal violent, torturous violence and lynching, you were going to be protected. And in my view that made all lynchings of African Americans during this era systematic.

You assert that even if a mob does form spontaneously, the prevailing sentiment of permission took any sense of spontaneity out of the event, it just became part of an overall social pathology.

You'd see in some of the imagery from these events people posing next to the victims dangling body because there was no sense of shame, there was no sense of legal liability following these things.

The true evil of slavery in my opinion was not involuntary servitude. The true evil of slavery was this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy, this notion that these black people are not fully human.

And the difficulty we have in this country is that our 13th Amendment which prohibited involuntary servitude didn't deal with the narrative. And in that respect, I don't believe slavery ended at the end of the Civil War, it just evolved.

Every white person was fully deputized in the shadow system of justice.

That's exactly right. And once the federal troops left at the end of reconstruction, people were encouraged to use violence to enforce compliance.

Some of the lynchings that we highlight in our report reveal this, there was a man named Jesse Thornton who was lynched in Leverna, Alabama, 1940, for referring to a white police officer by his name without the title of Mr.

and he was grabbed and he was killed. In 1919, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia lynched William Little, who was a returning soldier from World War I in African American man and they were antagonized by him wearing his army uniform.

And so he refused to take his uniform off and he was lynched. Man named Jeff Brown in 1916 was running through fear-blood Mississippi to catch a train. He bumped into a white girl and he was lynched.

He was lynched. The idea that he had some place important to be that might cause him to even casually bump into this white woman was an assent of this order until he was lynched.

That kind of violence, that kind of oppression was being enforced only because of this system that did deputize every white person to engage in this kind of subordination.

I'm puzzled as to how contemporaneous newspaper accounts of lynchings and other violence against Southern blacks provided a whole lot of information for you.

It would suggest that there was some degree of sympathy or fact finding in the reporting at the time which well it would be shocked to me that Southern papers were even handed in the coverage of these vigilante crimes.

They clearly were not. When you look at the coverage it's often quite celebratory and so we were able to understand the ugliness of it because they didn't see it as ugly and they were therefore comfortable detailing it how many times the person was shot, how much mutilation took place, how the person was carved up, whether there was collateral violence directed at other black homes and black churches and black community members.

All of that would sometimes be detailed both because it served to reinforce the narrative and to expand the terror.

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