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Citation |
Brown MJ. Peace Change 2003; 28(3): 378-419. |
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Copyright |
(Copyright © 2003, Peace History Society; Peace and Justice Studies Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons) |
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DOI |
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PMID |
unavailable |
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Abstract |
More than three thousand people, predominantly African American males, were lynched in the United States between 1892 and 1940. Occurring mostly in the South, lynching was a means that white southerners used to enforce white supremacy and prevent African Americans from achieving political, social, and economic gains after the Civil War ended slavery. White southerners declared that the threat of black men raping white women necessitated lynching. They further argued that inaction by the courts and the black community's shielding of criminals justified mob action, theories that gained wide acceptance in the South and that were commonly accepted in the North as well. In the 1890s, black women, led by anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett, began a protest against lynching that swelled into a sizable movement. Under Wells-Barnett's leadership, anti-lynching activists dismantled the theory of white women's protection and formulated a strategy of investigation and exposure that became the template for future anti-lynching drives. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909, it made anti-lynching a priority and drew black and white women to its anti-lynching battle. By the 1920s, women 's anti-lynching activity had become essential to the NAACP's drive for federal anti-lynching legislation and its campaign for passage of the Dyer bill. NAACP secretary Walter White's reliance on women increased throughout the 1920s, and women, courted both as voters and moral authorities, achieved a new level of importance in social movements and drives for legislation. This marked the beginning of the NAACP's twenty-year struggle for federal anti-lynching legislation, a campaign in which black and white women worked cooperatively and were essential to the campaign for the Dyer bill. |