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
Resolved, That the National W.C.T.U, which has for years counted among
its departments that of peace and arbitration, is utterly opposed to all
lawless acts in any and all parts of our common lands and it urges these
principles upon the public, praying that the time may speedily come
when no human being shall be condemned without due process of law; and
when the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such
lawlessness shall be banished from the world, and childhood, maidenhood
and womanhood shall no more be the victims of atrocities worse than
death.
This is not the resolution offered by Mrs. Fessenden. She offered the one
passed last year by the W.C.T.U. which was a strong unequivocal
denunciation of lynching. But she was told by the chairman of the
committee on resolutions, Mrs. Rounds, that there was already a lynching
resolution in the hands of the committee. Mrs. Fessenden yielded the floor
on that assurance, and no resolution of any kind against lynching was
submitted and none was voted upon, not even the one above, taken from the
columns of the _Union Signal_, the organ of the national W.C.T.U!
Even the wording of this resolution which was printed by the W.C.T.U.,
reiterates the false and unjust charge which has been so often made as an
excuse for lynchers. Statistics show that less than one-third of the
lynching victims are hanged, shot and burned alive for "unspeakable
outrages against womanhood, maidenhood and childhood;" and that nearly a
thousand, including women and children, have been lynched upon any pretext
whatsoever; and that all have met death upon the unsupported word of white
men and women. Despite these facts this resolution which was printed,
cloaks an apology for lawlessness, in the same paragraph which affects to
condemn it, where it speaks of "the unspeakable outrages which have so
often provoked such lawlessness."
Miss Willard told me the day before the resolutions were offered that the
Southern women present had held a caucus that day. This was after I, as
fraternal delegate from the Woman's Mite Missionary Society of the A.M.E.
Church at Cleveland, O., had been introduced to tender its greetings. In
so doing I expressed the hope of the colored women that the W.C.T.U. would
place itself on record as opposed to lynching which robbed them of
husbands, fathers, brothers and sons and in many cases of women as well.
No note was made either in the daily papers or the _Union Signal_ of that
introduction and greeting, although every other incident of that morning
was published. The failure to submit a lynching resolution and the wording
of the one above appears to have been the result of that Southern caucus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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