The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United StatesWells-Barnett, Ida B.
History
The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
African Americans -- History -- 1877-1964; Lynching -- United States; Lynching -- United States -- Statistics
I never at any time or place or in any way misrepresented that
organization. When asked what concerted action had been taken by churches
and great moral agencies in America to put down Lynch Law, I was compelled
in truth to say that no such action had occurred, that pulpit, press and
moral agencies in the main were silent and for reasons known to
themselves, ignored the awful conditions which to the English people
appeared so abhorent. Then the question was asked what the great moral
reformers like Miss Frances Willard and Mr. Moody had done to suppress
Lynch Law and again I answered nothing. That Mr. Moody had never said a
word against lynching in any of his trips to the South, or in the North
either, so far as was known, and that Miss Willard's only public utterance
on the situation had condoned lynching and other unjust practices of the
South against the Negro. When proof of these statements was demanded, I
sent a letter containing a copy of the _New York Voice_, Oct. 23,1890, in
which appeared Miss Willard's own words of wholesale slander against the
colored race and condonation of Southern white people's outrages against
us. My letter in part reads as follows:
But Miss Willard, the great temperance leader, went even further in
putting the seal of her approval upon the southerners' method of dealing
with the Negro. In October, 1890, the Women's Christian Temperance Union
held its national meeting at Atlanta, Georgia. It was the first time in
the history of the organization that it had gone south for a national
meeting, and met the southerners in their own homes. They were welcomed
with open arms. The governor of the state and the legislature gave
special audiences in the halls of state legislation to the temperance
workers. They set out to capture the northerners to their way of seeing
things, and without troubling to hear the Negro side of the question,
these temperance people accepted the white man's story of the problem
with which he had to deal. State organizers were appointed that year,
who had gone through the southern states since then, but in obedience to
southern prejudices have confined their work to white persons only. It
is only after Negroes are in prison for crimes that efforts of these
temperance women are exerted without regard to "race, color, or previous
condition." No "ounce of prevention" is used in their case; they are
black, and if these women went among the Negroes for this work, the
whites would not receive them. Except here and there, are found no
temperance workers of the Negro race; "the great dark-faced mobs" are
left the easy prey of the saloonkeepers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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