Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of February 22, 1898, Frazier Baker, an African-American postmaster in the predominantly white hamlet of Lake City, South Carolina, awoke to discover a raging fire deliberately set in back of the small wooden structure that housed both his family and the town’s post office.

In early 1893, a white reporter, writing in the New York Sun, offered a grisly account of the burning at the stake in Paris, Texas, of a black man accused of molesting a white girl.As press accounts like this make clear, to witness a lynching—or even just glimpse its aftermath—could be a searing experience for those who were the most likely victims of the lynch mob—young African-American males.

This inventory includes the names of 2,400 of the African-Americans who were lynched in the United States from 1865 to 1965.

From 1889 to 1918 more than 2,400 African Americans were hanged or burned at the stake. Many lynching victims were accused of little more than making "boastful remarks," "insulting a white man" or seeking employment "out of place."

He was an African-American who had been confined to the Pearl River County Jail in Poplarville after being charged with the rape of a pregnant white woman on or about February 23, 1959, on Highway 11 about a mile south of the Lamar County line. On Monday, May 4, 1959, ten days after being taken from the jail, Parker's body was found in the Pearl River in Louisiana about two and a half miles south of the Bogalusa Bridge.