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Searching For California's Hang Trees, Ken Gonzales-Day

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Also known as the Hang Tree Series, this was part of Ken Gonzales-Day's eight year project to search for, and photograph, possible, probably, and verifiable lynching sites in California. Perhaps most significantly, his project included the discovery and documentation of over 350 cases of lynching in the state of California between 1850 and 1935. Contrary to the popular image of 'cowboy justice' and Wild West vigilantism as being an exclusively white-on-white crime, Gonzales-Day was able to document, that in California, the majority (nearly two thirds) of cases of vigilantism involved the lynching of African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, and Latinos …