In 2018, a national memorial to victims of lynching opened in Montgomery, Alabama. The culmination of years of research, advocacy and planning by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the memorial consists of 800 columns

- one for each county where EJI researchers have documented at least one killing - and individual inscriptions for each of the more than 4,000 lynching victims recorded in the EJI's heralded 2015 report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.

This current moment of memorialisation calls for a broader reckoning with racial violence in modern America. The pioneering work of EJI and other advocacy groups demonstrates an increasingly ambitious and sophis­ticated approach to documenting this bloody history. The EJI memorial and museum, located in the original capital of the Confederacy and built within a few hundred yards of a former slave market, emphasise a legacy of brutality and oppression that reaches back centuries. Furthermore, the EJI lynching report acknowledges the national reach of mob violence and highlights campaigns of racial terror, such as the lynching of hundreds of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the south-western border­lands, that have received less public attention. Yet while the bloodshed has transcended regional boundaries and targeted a variety of vulnerable popu­lations, the current campaign for memorialisation reveals the difficulties inherent in telling a national narrative of racial violence in modern America. The challenges are considerable, but the need has never been more urgent.

Racial violence is at once the most prominent form of political violence in American history and the most difficult to synthesise.¹ Scholars and activists have compared the patterns of violence committed against racial and ethnic groups in various regions of the country and drawn parallels between the racial motivations of American violence at home and abroad, yet such analysis runs the risk of oversimplification.