Ida B. Wells: “Lynching: Our National Crime”

Impact

Wells was deeply affected by racism and the violence inflicted by whites upon blacks in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and she took it upon herself to wage a public crusade against the sufferings and indignities of an oppressed race and the continued wrongs and atrocities perpetrated upon them. To that end, she began to write articles and pamphlets and to lecture widely both in this country and in Great Britain. In doing so, Wells criticized both blacks and whites. Black elites, shielded by their wealth from many of the indignities of discrimination, ignored the problems of others in their communities. Black clergymen did not speak out strongly enough. Black politicians betrayed their race to seek the favor of whites. Whites accepted social myths and cultural stereotypes that allowed them to excuse inexcusable crimes against humanity.

Ida Wells's stark depictions—in photographs and words—of the horrors of lynching and her fact-based discussion of that practice attracted public attention for the first time both here and abroad. Wells was largely responsible for starting the slow, tortuous process toward public rejection of those crimes. She broke the silence and, in doing so, challenged deeply rooted cultural assumptions. Her determination kept the issue alive and forced others, white and black, to confront it. Still, progress was difficult. The NAACP had minor successes during its first decade in persuading many people that a federal antilynching bill was necessary. The organization's own investigation of lynching led to the publication of Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889–1918 (1919), an important document. The NAACP also backed the so-called Dyer antilynching bill that passed the House of Representatives in the early 1920s but died in the Senate. Similar antilynching legislation passed the House in 1937 and 1940, but southern opposition killed each of those bills in the Senate. In 1922 Mary Burnett Talbert, then president of the National Association of Colored Women, formed the Anti-Lynching Crusaders. Like Wells, the Crusaders advocated federal antilynching legislation and actively sought the support of white women, particularly southern white women. In 1930 southern white women formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Their efforts are credited with having contributed to a significant reduction in the incidence of lynching in the South.

In 2018 the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama. Designed to commemorate and honor the victims of lynching in the United States, the memorial was built by the Equal Justice Initiative. It includes a landscaped area named for Wells where visitors can sit and reflect on the history of racial violence in the United States.