WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- Hate crime murders rose to a record high in the United States in 2019, according to annual data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday.

The number of overall hate crime incidents was also at its highest level in more than a decade, the data showed, noting a majority of these crimes were motivated by bias against race, ethnicity or ancestry.

Fifty-one people were the victims of murder or non-negligent manslaughter motivated by hate in 2019, compared with 24 people killed the year before, the data showed.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 2018 had already been the deadliest year on record for victims of hate crimes since the FBI began tracking the data in the early 1990s.

"When one individual is targeted by a hate crime, it hurts the whole community. That's why people are feeling vulnerable and afraid," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.

Of 15,588 law enforcement agencies which provided data to the FBI in 2019, 2,172 reported 7,314 hate crime incidents, up from 7,120 in 2018, local media reported.

The data shows hate crimes had been trending downward since the most recent peak in 2008, but steadily increased almost every year since 2014.

Race-based crimes have remained the most common type of hate crime in the nearly three decades the FBI has tracked the data, according to the ADL, noting 48.4 percent of race-based hate crime offenses in 2019 were anti-Black.

Of hate crime offenses motivated by religious bias in 2019, 60.3 percent were anti-Jewish.

The FBI defines a hate crime as a "criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."