Anti-lynching movement participant Ida B. Wells
Women's contributions
Many women contributed to the anti-lynching movement through the Dyer Bill, including Ida B. Wells, Mary Burnett Talbert and Angelina Grimké. The bill exposed both lynching and the effects it had on the people.Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was a significant figure in the anti-lynching movement. After the lynchings of her three friends, she condemned the lynchings in the newspapers Free Speech and Headlight, both owned by her. Wells wrote to reveal the abuse and race violence African Americans had to go through. She was a prominent member of many civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, the Niagara Movement, and the Afro-American Council. Wells encouraged black women to work for anti-lynching laws to be passed. She was also part of the “First Suffrage Club for Black Women." Ida B. Wells asked “Is Rape the ‘Cause’ of Lynching?” in their circular titled “The Shame of America,” that emphasized the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, when they were in the Anti-Lynching Campaigns. Wells drew attention to the number of 83 women being lynched in a time frame of 30 years in addition to the 3,353 men who were also lynched. Because of her anti-lynching campaigning she received death threats from racist rioters. In 1892, she published the editorial "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," in which she was deeply critical of the South's relationship with lynching. She said the following:Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.Having insulted white women's morality, the reaction in her hometown of Memphis was particularly violent; her newspaper was looted and burned down, and her co-owners were run out of town. Wells had been in the North when the editorial was published and was forced to remain in the North due to threats that she would be lynched if she returned to Memphis. After having her children she got out of the organizations but she kept on protesting against lynching. In 1899 she protested the Sam Hose lynching in Georgia.