Sankofa · the year in one view

The Year

Every killing of a Black person in this record, laid out as a calendar and a timeline at the same time — then mapped, so you can see where they gather. One dot is one person.

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Pick a year

Years marked ◔ are still filling. Official datasets lag by months to years, so a recent year always looks emptier than it was.

THIS YEAR IS INCOMPLETE — READ THE SHAPE, NOT THE TOTAL.

Calendar and timeline, at once

Each square is one day. Read a row and it is a month. Read the whole grid and it is the year running left to right, top to bottom. Darker means more people.

fewer more Blank = no record on that date in this dataset. It does not mean nobody died.

What kind of record

These categories are not interchangeable and this page does not merge them.

Where they concentrate

Each circle is a place; the bigger the circle, the more records that year. Zoom in and the clusters break into individual people.

What this page is, exactly. It shows records in this dataset for a given year — not a national death toll. Sankofa ingests from authoritative datasets, and no dataset of this kind is complete. Where a killing was never recorded, never investigated, or never attributed, it is not here. The absence of a square is not evidence of a quiet day.
And the number that is missing on purpose. There is no line on this page comparing a year to a national population rate, because doing that honestly needs a denominator this dataset does not have. A rate calculated from an incomplete numerator is worse than no rate at all — it looks rigorous and is not.

Records: Sankofa curated set + ingested authoritative datasets (see How this record is built for every source and what each one cannot tell you). Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.