The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of America

Abstract

This essay traces a tradition in civil rights that begins with the NAACP's media campaign to fight unjust racial violence between 1909 and 1925, instead of with the education desegregation litigation of the 1950s and 1960s. I recover this earlier period by analyzing the activities of the NAACP's anti-lynching and mob violence reduction campaign during the first quarter of the 20th century. The organization's effort to secure African American equality centered on changing public opinion as the NAACP maintained that lynching could be stopped when it “reached the heart and conscience of the American people.” In order to wage a battle against negative public perceptions, this essay describes how the NAACP executed a three-pronged media strategy focused on writing newspaper articles, publishing pamphlets, and printing its own magazine, The Crisis. By articulating the terror of lynching and broadcasting it to a wider audience through these different channels, the NAACP achieved considerable success in reframing the debate concerning African American criminality and American justice in a period overlooked by most scholars.

Keywords:

• civil rights
• lynching
• media
• NAACP
• violence

Acknowledgments

Thanks for very helpful comments: CPC, Michael Dawson, Charles Epp, Paul Frymer, Melissa Harris-Perry, Uri McMillan, Tali Mendelberg, Michael Ralph, Rick Valelly, and the students in the political science honors seminar at Pepperdine University. Institutional support provided by: Center for Law, Society, and Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Pepperdine University.

Notes

NAACP, Tenth Annual Report for the Year 1919, NAACP Archives, Library of Congress, 89.

Ibid.

Ibid., 91.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1940), 68.

Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975); Mark Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against School Segregation, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Clement Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

I will discuss in greater detail why Wells is missing from NAACP narratives such as Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against School Segregation; Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005).

Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

Wells, Crusade for Justice.

Ibid., 72; Giddings, Ida, 238–239.

Mary White Ovington, “Early Years of the NAACP and the Urban League,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 10, 1932.

Wells, Crusade For Justice, 84.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (New York: Arno, 1969).

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901).

Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Cary Wintz, ed., African American Political Thought, 1890–1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).

Booker T. Washington, quoted in the Indianapolis Freeman, August 28, 1897. Even if we take seriously the claim in recent scholarship that Washington did not completely ignore lynching, it is also true that he did not actively contribute to an anti-lynching agenda. See Robert Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Radical Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 108–109; James McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 363.

Finally, in 1912, Washington made a strong statement against lynching declaring that most lynching victims were black and were innocent of any wrongdoings but this was after the NAACP had already formed. See Booker T. Washington, “Is the Negro Having a Fair Chance?” Century 75 (November 1912): 46–55.

C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes To Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1969); Meier, Negro Thought in America, 161–170; Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 21–31.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: H. Holt, 1993).

For more on the Niagara Movement, see Elliott M. Rudwick, “The Niagara Movement,” Journal of Negro History XLII (1957): 177–200; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 742–744; Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 224; E. Franklin Fraizer, The Negro in the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1949), 523–524; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (New York: Knopf, 2000), 438; Raymond Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

Rudwick, “The Niagara Movement,” 178.

For example, on numerous occasions, prominent abolitionists such as Oswald Garrison Villard argued that farm ownership and education were of little use if blacks were going to be burned at the stake every week. Also, Mary White Ovington wrote flattering accounts of the Niagara Movement and Du Bois honored her with an invitation to join the movement. See McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 380–386.

Ibid.

James L. Crouthamel, “The Springfield Race Riot of 1908,” Journal of Negro History XLV (July 1960): 170.

Ibid., 174. For another account of the riot, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois in 1908 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

For the most detailed treatment of the NAACP's development, see Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009). See also Kellogg, NAACP.

The wife of a streetcar conductor named George Richardson, an African American who had been working in the neighborhood as her attacker. Richardson was arrested and jailed. Later, before a special grand jury, the woman admitted that she had been severely beaten by a white man and that Richardson had nothing to do with the attack.

“The Call” was published in the New York Evening Post on February 12, 1909, on the hundredth anniversary of President Lincoln's birth.

New York Evening Post, February 12, 1909.

Mary White Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), 106.

Ibid.

For more on this, see Wells, Crusade for Justice, 321–333; Thomas C. Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (New York: Gale, 1982), 38–61; Giddings, Ida; Kellogg, NAACP; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 386–407.

For accounts of the development of the NAACP, see Sullivan, Lift Every Voice; Kellogg, NAACP; Langston Hughes, Fight for Freedom (New York: Norton, 1967); B. Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rice of NAACP, 1911–1929 (New York: Atheneum, 1972); Minnie Finch, The NAACP: Its Fight for Justice (London: Scarecrow Press, 1981).

John Hope Franklin, “Propaganda as History,” Massachusetts Review 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 417–434; Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision”: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 150–195; Melvyn Stokes, The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

For more on the NAACP's campaign to suppress and then censor Birth of Nation, Stokes, The Birth of a Nation, 134–170; Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 48–59; Kellogg, NAACP, 1:142–145.

Board Minutes, NAACP, April 10, 1916.

Ibid., April 9, 1916.

Ibid., December 10, 1916.

Meier, Negro Thought in America, 161.

Minutes, Executive Session, May 14, 1910, in Board Minutes, NAACP.

Mississippi passed legislation forbidding the sale of publications “tending to disturb relations between the races,” as a result of which a Crisis agent was arrested in April 1920, badly beaten, fined, and sentence to six months imprisoning for selling the magazine. (Reported in Kellogg, NAACP, 290.) Also in 1919, after the Phillips County race massacre, the Arkansas governor told the postmaster general not to distribute any more issues of The Crisis.

Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 426–427.

Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 247.

Board Minutes, NAACP, June 12, 1916.

Elizabeth Freeman, The Waco Lynching, Report, 1916, Anti-Lynching File, NAACP Archives.

Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 514.

Others include “Massacre At East St. Louis,” The Crisis, September 1917; “The Burning at Dyersburg,” The Crisis, February 1918; “The Burning of Jim McIlherron,” The Crisis, May 1918.

Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 411.

In June 1919, circulation went to 104,000. Board Minutes, NAACP, July 11, 1919. Average monthly circulation during 1919 was 94,908. See Twelfth Annual Report for the Year 1921 for Crisis circulation from 1911–1921, 81.

David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 2. Lewis acknowledged: “Du Bois was the founding editor of one of the most remarkable journals of opinion and propaganda in America. Its monthly circulation of 100,000 and better exceeded that of Herbert Croly's four-year-old New Republic and Oswald Villard's Nation, and was four times larger than Max Eastman's Liberator, the successor to the banned Masses.” See also John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America: 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 203–206.

Roy Nash, “Waco Horror Stirs to Action,” Letter, 1916, Anti-Lynching File, NAACP Archives; Board Minutes, NAACP, July 10, 1916; Board Minutes, November 13, 1916.

Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2005), 169.

Tenth Annual Report for the Year 1919, NAACP Archives, Library of Congress. Some titles of lynching related pamphlets include: An American Lynching, A Ten Year Fight Against Lynching, Massacring Whites in Arkansas, Burnings at a Stake, A Lynching Uncovered, Laws Against Lynching, The Mobbing of John R. Shillady, and Three Thousand Will Burn Negro..

Board Minutes, March 8, 1920, NAACP Archives, Library of Congress.

Board Minutes, May 5, 1920, NAACP Archives, Library of Congress.

James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1933), 330.

Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, 150; Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1919).

Thirty Years of Lynching, 16.

Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, 152.

“Many Lynchings Taking Place in the United States,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 3, 1919.

“3,224 Persons Lynched by Mobs In Last 30 Years,” Atlanta Constitution, May 3, 1919.

Johnson, Along This Way, 331.

Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, 112.

Annual Report for the Year 1916, NAACP Archives, Library of Congress.

Kellogg, NAACP, 148.

Tenth Annual Report for the Year 1919, 61. See also Herbert Seligmann, “Race War?,” The New Republic, August 13, 1919, 48–50; “Democracy and Jim Crowism,” The New Republic, September 3, 1919, 151–152, “Protecting Southern Womanhood,” The Nation 108, no. 2815, 938–939; “The Press Abets the Mob,” The Nation 109, no. 2831.

Kellogg, NAACP.

Board Minutes, NAACP, October 13, 1919; Crisis XIX (March 1920), 244.

“A Lynching Uncovered,” Pamphlet, Anti-Lynching File, NAACP Archives, 1919.

Rev. Judson Dinkins, Letter, in Anti-Lynching File, NAACP Archives, May 26, 1919.

John Shillady, Letter, Anti-Lynching File, NAACP Archives, July 17, 1919.

“Moonshine Whisky and Lynch Law Raise Tumult in Telfair County,” Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1919; “No Wonder?,” Editorial, Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1919.

“Rewards Offered in Lynching Case,” The Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 1919; Tenth Annual Report for the Year 1919, pg 27; “A Lynching Uncovered,” Pamphlet, Anti-Lynching File, NAACP Archives, 1919.

“Negro Lynched in Courtyard,” Washington Post, July 27, 1919; “Lynched for Guarding Girls,” New York Globe, July 21, 1919; “Aged Negro Lynched On May 26th—Authorities Conceal News Under Claim of Investigation to Find Guilty Parties—No Arrests Have Been Made,” Baltimore Daily Herald, July 25, 1919; “The South Awakening,” Pittsburg Post, July 26, 1919; untitled article, St. Louis Morning Star, July 25, 1919; “Lynching Kept Secret,” New York Times, July 25, 1919. Interestingly, except for the Atlanta Constitution Journal, no other newspapers mentioned the NAACP by name in describing how the lynching in Milan was uncovered.

In their press releases, they often highlighted obscured lynchings or other racial injustices that escaped the attention of the white press. White journalists would then report on it as if it was their story.

Search combines three mainstream newspapers (the New York Times, Atlanta Constitution, and Washington Post) with the results from the America's Historical Newspaper index (a database of nearly two thousand titles from fifty states from important repositories of early American newspapers such as the Library of Congress and the Wisconsin Historical Society and many others). For both searches I searched for articles containing the following search terms: “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” AND lynching or riot or mob or violence for the years 1914–1919.

Eleventh Annual Report for the Year 1920, NAACP Archives, Library of Congress.

Ovington, “Early Years of the NAACP and the Urban League.”

Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 48.

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).

Leigh Raiford, “‘Come Let Us Build A New World Together': SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007): 1139.