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.