The number of African-Americans who were lynched in Southern states is a lot higher than previously thought, according to a new report.

It is generally understood that thousands of blacks have been lynched over the last century or so, but “targeted racial violence” hadn’t been fully documented, states a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based nonprofit.

A total of 3,959 black people were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950, researchers said, according to a Washington Post report. That includes an additional 700 people who were not named previously but who likely deserve to be included in the toll.

Because many past attempts to document lynchings happened while they were still going on, the report’s authors said they don’t believe the legacy of lynchings have been fully confronted in a “meaningful way.”

“Our interest is really in forcing the country to talk differently about this history,” said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, according to the Post’s report.

The report is titled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” and is part of series of studies on lynchings in an attempt to truly quantify the toll the practice had on the African-American community.

The report’s authors reviewed research conducted by Tuskegee University, the Chicago Tribune’s annual of lynching victims published in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and the 1919 report by the NAACP finding that 3,224 people had been lynched between 1889 to 1918.

In particular, sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck wrote a book in 1995 that attempted to compile these figures into a more comprehensive record of lynchings, estimating that more than 2,400 were killed in lynchings between 1882 and 1930 in the South.