Ida B. Wells Campaigns for Federal Anti-Lynching Legislation 1890s

Ida B. Wells spent the mid-1890s lobbying Congress and President Cleveland for federal anti-lynching legislation. She presented petitions, met with senators, and published statistical reports. Congress refused to act, and Cleveland offered only tepid condemnations. Wells's campaign nonetheless kept lynching before the national and international press and established the framework for the NAACP's decades-long anti-lynching legislative fight that would begin in 1909.