Movement of resistance · 1892–1955
The Anti-Lynching Movement
As racial-terror lynchings spread, Black journalists and activists, led by Ida B. Wells, documented the violence and fought to end it.
After Reconstruction collapsed, lynching became a tool of racial control, and thousands of Black Americans were murdered by mobs, often with impunity. In 1892, after three friends were lynched in Memphis, Ida B. Wells launched a data-driven crusade: she investigated cases, published Southern Horrors and The Red Record, and took the campaign international.
The movement she helped start ran for decades, through the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns and repeated (long-blocked) federal bills, and laid groundwork for the modern civil-rights struggle. The Equal Justice Initiative has since documented more than 4,400 racial-terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950.
On the timeline
- October 1892Ida B. Wells' anti-lynching crusade
Wells documents and exposes lynching with "Southern Horrors," launching a global campaign.
- November 10, 1898The Wilmington coup of 1898
White supremacists violently overthrow a multiracial elected government in North Carolina.
- July 1919Claude McKay's "If We Must Die"
Published amid the Red Summer's racial violence, McKay's defiant sonnet becomes a touchstone of Black resistance poetry.
Resources
The journalist and anti-lynching crusader.
EJI's landmark report documenting 4,400+ racial-terror lynchings.
Wells's pioneering investigation and indictment of lynching.
Links a 2014 hanging death to the long history of lynching and its reenactments.
Documents ~2,000 previously uncounted Reconstruction-era lynchings.
The 1919 Red Summer, including the Elaine, Arkansas massacre, among the deadliest, least-taught.
Drawing the line from racial-terror lynching to the modern death penalty.
Reopens the unsolved 1967 Klan killing of NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson Sr.
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- part of (incoming)·EventThe murder of Emmett Till
A lynching whose exposure powered the long campaign against racial terror.