"[I must] give the public the facts, in the belief that there is still a sense of justice in the American people, and that it will yet assert itself in condemnation of outlawry and in defense of oppressed and persecuted humanity."
- Ida B. Wells
You may hear the term “lynching” and think back to grainy black and white pictures in a history textbook. The truth is, there is so much more to lynching’s history, present, and the anti-lynching movement in America than what most people are taught in school. Let’s dive in.
We need to look to historical context for how something so horrific became so normalized in America. The popularity of this deathly retaliation followed the passing of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, just as African Americans began to establish themselves as full citizens and build up their own communities and businesses. While there is no specific start date to look to, lynching began as a tactic used to instill fear in these communities during the Reconstruction Era in the United States. It didn’t just happen a few times every year- in 1882, for example, records indicate that there were 3,446 lynching victims made up of African American men, women, and children. Although parts of the US population refused to believe it, lynchings were indeed planned, public events and were advertised ahead of time. White families would cheer and bring their children to watch the horrific murders play out in front of them as entertainment.
Many Black newspapers fought back against the murders by publishing accounts of lynching to raise awareness of what was happening in the US and abroad. One such investigative journalist, and one of the most prominent activist faces in the anti-lynching movement, was Ida B. Wells. Ida herself had lost three friends to lynching as retaliation for opening a grocery store too close to their White competitors. After publishing an account that exposed the true nature of her friends’ murders, she found that the offices for her newspaper called “Free Speech” had been burned to the ground.
Ida was not intimidated. Instead, she dedicated even more of her life to leading the anti-lynching movement. She wrote reports like the famous Lynch Law in Georgia, which showed the world that lynching men, women, and kids was used as retaliation for attempting to register to vote, for being too successful, for failure to demure acceptably to Whites, or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was important, shocking work, as many people in the US believed that lynching was an act only done by “crazy” people with no self-control, rather than being planned, orderly events with formal marketing.
Ida was not alone in the anti-lynching movement. Many organized groups used education, legal action, and news publications to fight lynching. These groups included the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) (which Ida co-founded as the predecessor group Niagara Movement), the Council for Interracial Cooperation (CIC), and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). Ida herself also organized the first suffrage club for Black women and led other activist efforts that ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the YMCA's racist policies of exclusion.
One of the largest outcomes of the anti-lynching movement occurred in 1919, when the NAACP supported the 1918 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill- it passed the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate. Although the Dyer Bill didn’t pass, it played a key role in turning the American public against lynching and set the stage for future efforts to fight lynching at the federal level. The bill’s language influenced both the NAACP’s efforts moving forward as well as the Costigan-Wagner Bill introduced many years later.
Although these actions were crucial, the anti-lynching movement was so much more than legislators’ bills and investigative journalism. The arts were a popular and effective medium that helped bring about consciousness of and support for the movement across America. Angelina Weld Grimke and Georgia Douglass Johnson were 20th-century writers and playwrights who wrote moving poems and plays that exposed the horrors of lynching to the public. Famously, “Strange Fruit” was originally a poem written by Abel Meeropol about lynching before being popularized as a song recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 that sold over 1 million copies. The song came to represent the horrific brutality and violence that lynching involved and has endured popularity and relevance since its original recording. Strange Fruit was even called "a declaration of war… the beginning of the civil rights movement" by Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, and retains relevance to this day. Although lynchings today don’t look like they did during the Jim Crow era, the recent murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are exactly that, and are meant to instill fear in the Black community just like they were over 100 years ago.
The United States government has once again failed to make lynching a federal crime- the recently introduced Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed the House of Representatives but has been untouched by the Senate for months following objections from Senator Rand Paul. For actionable steps to push the Senate to pass this act, go to naacp.org.
Sources:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/35/text, https://www.naacp.org/latest/emmett-till-antilynching-act/
Comments