IIIF
Southern women and lynching Item Info
- Title:
- Southern women and lynching
- Creator:
- Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching,
- Date Created:
- 1936
- Description:
- The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) was formed by Mrs. Jessie Daniel Ames (of Texas) in Atlanta in November of 1930, in response to a marked rise in the lynchings of Black men in the South during the early years of the Great Depression. Their group’s philosophy was “based on the belief that a continuous educational program, carried on day by day in the home, in the school, in the press, and in the church will end lynching by public demand.” Secondly, they aimed to emphasize, at all times, “the repudiation of the claim that lynching is necessary to the protection of white women,” a claim frequently made by the individuals and public mobs who enacted these heinous crimes. Their work followed the NAACP’s special committee on anti-lynching legislation (1916) and the longstanding demographic work on lynching begun by the Tuskegee Institute in 1882. Mrs. Ames, the Director of Women’s Work in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, began the ASWPL with only 12 members, and, by 1936 when this pamphlet was printed, more than 32,000 women, across the thirteen Southern states, had joined the cause–primarily promoting the eradication of lynching via education offered through religious and civic groups they already belonged to. The ASWPL ended their work in 1942, feeling that enough significant progress had been made. However, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented nearly 6500 racial terror lynchings in the US between 1865 and 1950, and a federal antilynching act (the Emmett Till Antilynching Act) was not passed into law by Congress until March of 2022, more than a century later.
- Subjects:
- Civil rights
- Source:
- Osher Map Library Collection
- Source Identifier:
- 58468
- Type:
- Text
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Southern women and lynching", Osher Map Library Collection, Osher Map Library & Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine
- Repository Link:
- https://oshermaps.org/map/58468.0001
Rights
- Rights:
- In Copyright
- Standardized Rights:
- https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/