Project Grant 2241522

This two-year, $103,735 National Science Foundation project grant will fund research into the effects of lynchings on the educational outcomes of children in Mississippi from 1927 to 1957. Mississippi State University, in collaboration with other researchers, will digitize historical education records from the Mississippi Department of Education containing school enrollment and attendance data for every child in the state. These records will be linked to county-level lynching data to estimate the causal impact of lynchings on the educational attainment of different racial groups. Specifically, the researchers will construct a measure of historical educational attainment to observe which children had completed their schooling when lynchings occurred in their communities. The results of this research into how exposure to racially-motivated violence affected black-white inequality could help guide policies to improve educational outcomes and narrow racial achievement gaps in the U.S., in line with the goals of the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075).