Lynchings of the past affect health today

Counties with higher rates of lynching between 1877 and 1950 showed higher mortality rates between 2010 and 2014. A new study by researchers from the University of South Carolina in the US, led by Janice Probst and Saundra Glover, looks into the relationship between past occurrence of lynching – unpunished, racially motivated murder – and recent death rates. The research, published in Springer’s Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, shows that when socio-economic and educational factors are taken into account, the death rate for the overall population of a county was higher between 2010 and 2014 if lynching events had taken place there in the past.