Due to the past history of racial tensions and lynchings, black journalists and activists associate lynching with white violence against blacks. If you Google “lynching today,” the first five links are about black people being lynched. Today America has practiced the use of new and old methods of lynching. In the 21st century people are still lynched for crimes committed. Hate crimes involving lynching have declined greatly since the 20th century, as has the activity of the infamous Ku Klux Klan. Lynching was a system of punishment designed to prevent the spread of rape culture and help protect white women from rape. However, over the years, this punishment turned into racial tension that increased as the years went by. Throughout the 20th century, black activists and journalists like Ida B. Wells documented every lynching in the United States to show people what was happening behind closed curtains in the South. Wells stressed the importance of recording these numbers in something called “Lynch Law.” In this documentation Wells counts the number of blacks lynched in different states. You can see the difference in the demographic areas where lynchings occurred most frequently; while New York only had 1, Tennessee had 28. The numbers varied from state to state, based on where they were located on the map. Wells' "Lynching Law" shows that the further south you go, the more frequent lynchings of blacks.