Lives, Not Metadata: Recovery Methods for Digital Histories of Racial Violence

• DOI: 10.1177/00027162211014424
• Author: Monica Muñoz Martinez
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Setting the Agenda

ANNALS, AAPSS, 694, March 2021 67

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211014424

Lives, Not

Metadata:

Recovery

Methods for

Digital

Histories of

Racial Violence

By

MONICA MUÑOZ

MARTINEZ

1014424ANN The Annals Of The American AcademyLives, Not Metadata

research-article2021

This article discusses new digital research projects by

historians, sociologists, and legal scholars that recover

previously unrecorded cases of racist violence in the

twentieth century and bring them into public view for

the first time. New cases are expanding current under-

standings of the past by documenting lynchings, racially

motivated homicides, police killings, church bombings,

and nonlethal types of violence that have targeted mul-

tiple racial and ethnic groups. Early findings from these

projects show that we only have a glimpse into wide-

spread practices of racial terror in the United States. I

argue for collecting broader sets of data about victims,

surviving relatives, aggressors, and events in the after-

math of violence, because doing so will create new

possibilities for studying widespread historical trauma,

institutional traces of racist violence, and public under-

standing of increasingly urgent historical lessons. To

keep the humanity of victims central to recovery

efforts, I suggest that researchers can learn from com-

munity preservation and memorialization practices.

Keywords: race; racial violence; policing; U.S. history;

lynching, digital history; restorative justice

Historians of race in the United States have

a key role to play in recovering and inter-

preting records of state-sanctioned racial vio-

lence, exposing uncomfortable truths, and

documenting the efforts of people who fought

for freedom and social justice. As the primary

investigator for Mapping Violence: Racial

Terror in Texas 1900–1930, I suggest that

informing scholarly and public understandings

of the past, and its relation to our present,

requires research that provides deeper insights

into climates of racial terror that shaped daily

Monica Muñoz Martinez is an associate professor of

history at the University of Texas at Austin. She wrote

the award-winning book The Injustice Never Leaves

You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard

University Press 2018), cofounded the educational non-

profit Refusing to Forget, and is the primary investiga-

tor for Mapping Violence: Racial Terror in Texas.

Correspondence: Monica.martinez1@austin.utexas.edu