Alton Sterling shooting

ALH, I agree with you that in addition to lynchings, there were a great many cases of straight-out extra-judicial executions of black people by local sheriffs and cops, with impunity, in certain parts of the South, which have never been counted in the lynching statistics. If you read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” about the Great Migration, there are several accounts of that sort of thing – for which, of course, justice was never rendered. I doubt that anyone has yet gone through all the old newspapers and other primary sources back to the Civil War to try to quantify killings of black people by law enforcement.