 Lynchings a century ago reduced black voter registration today. I'm Jacoba Williams, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. I looked at data on lynchings of blacks in southern states from 1882 to 1930. In total, there were over 3,000 lynchings during those years. And when you look at the location of those lynchings and compare them with recent data on black voter registration, you start to see a pattern. On average, the more lynchings there were in the given county, the lower the percentage of blacks who are registered to vote over a century later. This controls for education, earnings, incarceration rates, and county-level barriers to voting. In a place like Lafayette County, Florida, there were eight lynchings during those years. This means for every 1,000 black people, one of them was lynched. Today, the black voter registration rate is about 15% in that county. If those people hadn't been killed, you would expect to see a black voter registration rate of 55%. It's statistically significant and disturbing, but there's a logic to it. Lynchings were the original form of voter suppression. The terrorizing of the black population by lynchings, which continued well into the 20th century, were intended in part to show black people what would happen if they tried to participate in democracy, if they tried to vote. Take the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, the most famous lynching in U.S. history. People think he was lynched for whistling at a white woman, but one of his killers gave another reason after he was acquitted. He wanted to send a message to blacks, you'd better not vote. He was quoted saying, I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, **** are going to stay in their place. **** aren't going to vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. Today when black voters look at the efforts to suppress the black vote, whether it's felon disenfranchisement, voter ID laws, the gerrymandering of congressional districts, or the Supreme Court ruling against the Voting Rights Act, it's impossible to see it without seeing the legacy of Jim Crow. Full taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and yes, the terrorization of the black population by lynch mobs. It's impossible to understand black voting if you ignore the history of lynching.