For nearly a century after the Civil War, terroristic lynchings of Black men in the South were frequently justified as gallant acts by white men to protect their wives and daughters. From the beginning, Black women like Ida B. Wells spoke up against the clear hypocrisy in this framing. And, as Henry E. Barber recounted in a 1973 paper, in the 1930s, a group of white women joined them in defending lynching victims.
While the number of lynchings peaked toward the end of the nineteenth century, Barber writes, they saw a resurgence around the start of the Great Depression. Twenty Black victims were murdered in southern lynchings in 1930. In November of that year, Jessie Daniel Ames, Director of Women’s Work for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) in Atlanta, organized a meeting for what would become the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). Among those attending were representatives of the League of Women’s Voters, The Young Women’s Christian Association, the Parent-Teachers’ Association, and the women’s organization of the Southern Baptist Church.
Back in their own states, these women gave talks, published pamphlets, trained volunteers in how to argue persuasively, and even staged one-act plays. Starting in 1933, the women began investigating lynching cases. They visited towns where lynchings had taken place, interviewed local judges and sheriffs, and studied public attitudes.
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“When the findings were tabulated and reported, the evidence once more pointed to the fact that lynching in defense of white women was a popular excuse, but the real cause lay in social and economic competition between the two races,” Barber writes.
Ames called attention to newspaper articles that seemed designed to stoke mob violence with tales of “lovely” and “devout” young women “broken” and “ruined” by alleged Black criminals. The complaints had an impact, and in 1936 the ASWPL reported an “about face” in journalists’ lynching stories.
The group viewed sheriffs as a key to stopping lynchings since they were the ones who could give up a prisoner to the mob or refuse to do so. So they wrote letters to the sheriffs on the stationery of their clubs and organizations—and campaigned against the reelection of those who permitted lynchings.
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The group intervened more directly when they got word that a mob was beginning to gather somewhere in the South. Ames would look through her card file for the names of women nearby and give them a call. In some cases, the volunteers were assisted by ministers and other community leaders, and some showed up to the site themselves. According to Will Alexander, director of the CIC, “when white women appeared on the scene in a situation like that, these white men were afraid of them.”
Of course, the women faced opposition, including threats from the Ku Klux Klan and aggression from some locals in towns where they showed up. But, together with other ongoing work, particularly by Black organizers, they helped make lynchings an increasingly rare occurrence by the 1940s.
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