The racial justice group that published Lynchings in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror two years ago today collaborates with Google to bring us an interactive digital platform that fuses comprehensive data and varied personal stories – visually and orally – so that people can explore our nation’s dark history of lynching.

According to USA Today, the goal is to spark a national dialogue about a subject that is too rarely discussed yet is crucial to understanding racism today, says Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of best-selling book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

The website centers a map of 4,300 lynchings in 20 states and the voices of people who have been affected by lynching. The hub is complete with a series of oral histories, a documentary and call for the dismantling of the prison industrial complex through the Equal Justice Initiative.