How Did Black Women in the NAACP
Promote the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, 1918-1923?

Abstract

        During the early 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) undertook a serious movement to promote anti-lynching legislation at the federal level. African-American women spearheaded this effort by forming the Anti-Lynching Crusaders and attempting to organize one million female activists to publicize the horrors of lynching and donate to the cause. The following documents trace the origins of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders and the intensive political activism of these women. Though ultimately unsuccessful in promoting the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill, these women continued a tradition of anti-lynching campaigning begun in the 1890s by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and served as a forerunner to Jessie Daniel Ames's Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in the 1930s. (For more on this tradition, see another document project on this website, "How Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?")


 
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