Sherry Chandler

Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching

Lynching was once called the national crime of the United States, for the practice of seizing those accused or convicted of crimes and executing them without legal authority or due process of law has been peculiar to this country.

So begins Henry E. Barber’s article “The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” Phylon 1973;4:378-389.

Barber tells us that, according to the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute, 4,761 lynchings were recorded between 1882 (when recording began) and 1930, 71% of them were lynchings of African Americans, and 3,810 of them took place in the eleven Confederate States, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

The most commonly used excuse to justify this extra-legal punishment in the South was “in defense of southern white women.” Lynchings were believed to be a “sort of natural outburst, in some vague way a strong man’s gesture, splashed liberally with knight errantry and designed to protect the blushing flower of Southern womanhood.” [Quoting John R. Clowes in the Courier-Journal for March 10, 1940.]

This “natural outburst of knight errantry” malarky reminds me very strongly of the backlash Susan Falludi describes in The Terror Dream. Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, when it was easier to fantasize the return of John Wayne than to deal with reality.

The nation’s men, from the inhabitants of the White House on down, were reportedly assuming a hard-boiled comportment last seen in post-World War II cinema. They were anointed “the new hawks” of the new consensus, “fighting a new Cold War,” as tough on terrorists as the old hawks had been on Communists. They were men prepared to mete out “torture” and “focused brutality,” take “nasty and brutish means,” and chuck the “niceties” of avoiding civilian casualties, as muscle-flexing columnists in Newsweek, Time, Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and other publications intoned. “We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting,” columnist David Brooks [!] wrote in the Weekly Standard, approvingly. A new John Wayne masculinity was ascendant …[and] women figured largely as vulnerable maidens. (pages 4 & 5)

William Bennet wanted to Kill! and David Brooks wanted veins in his teeth. Everybody wanted to rescue Afghan women from their burkas and supply them with the latest cosmetics. But all this posturing had as little reality in 2001 as it did in 1901. To return to Barber:

Tuskegee Institute, however, reported that only 16.7 percent of the victims between 1889 and 1929 were lynched for rape and 6.7 percent for attempted rape. [Quoting Arthur Franklin Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, Chapel Hill, 1933.] Quite clearly, crimes against women were not the real cause of lynching. However, regardless of the crime, the accused Negro had to be lynched in defense of white women.

And in the twentieth century as in the twenty-first, some women weren’t buying it. A select group, lead by Jessie Daniel Ames, decided to take action. From the Handbook of Texas Online:

The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded in November 1930 in Atlanta, Georgia, by Jessie Daniel Ames, a Texas-born southern woman active in suffrage and interracial reform movements. She and twelve founding members established the ASWPL as an arm of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an organization working for racial harmony. The ASWPL’s founders, all active in Protestant churches and interracial organizations (they were later joined by members of Jewish women’s groups), wanted to prevent lynching by educating southern whites about its causes and prevention. They were convinced that lynchings were sanctioned murder and the result of “false chivalry,” the use by white men of white women’s virtue as an excuse for racially motivated violence against blacks. The ASWPL sought to convince white women of their responsibility to refuse to play a helpless role in that process.

By the early 1940s, Barber reports the ASWPL had pledges of support from more than 43,000 individuals and 109 churches and civic organizations. By 1934, all thirteen Southern governors had signed on. By 1939, they had recruited 1,229 local law enforcement officers. These women not only spoke in churches and meetings, they were also known to confront lynch mobs. Barber quotes one witness as saying

When white women appeared on the scene in a situation like that, these white men were afraid of them.

By the late thirties, early forties, the ASWPL had helped turn public opinion against lynching. In 1939, there were only three recorded lynchings. In 1942, the association, which had always been very loosely organized, dissolved as women’s concern about lynchings waned and the country’s involvement in WWII took their attention.

As women like Susan Sontag and Katha Pollitt (or perhaps more appropriately, Barbara Kingsolver and the Dixie Chicks) who spoke out against the post-9/11 excesses were called traitors and bitches and threatened with death, so the women of the ASWPL were called “nigger lovers” and sob sisters and were threatened with violence by groups like the KKK.

I had never heard of the ASWPL until I came to read Lillian Smith’s 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream. Smith buys heavily into Freud and her thinking, while admirably frank about miscegenation and violence, often manages to leave all clichés comfortably intact: neurotic white women in the front parlor, earth-mother mammies in the kitchen. Her treatment of the ASWPL is more remarkable for its emotion than for its hard facts. Nevertheless she is capable of eye-opening insights, as in her writing about the psychic cost for both white and black women when they decided that they would break one of the South’s central taboos and sit down to eat together:

It is difficult for those not reared as white southerners to remember how this eating taboo in childhood was woven into the mesh of things that are “wrong,” how it pulled anxieties from stronger prohibitions and attached them to itself. But we who live here cannot forget. One of these church women told me of her first eating experience with colored friends. Though her conscience was serene, and her enjoyment of this association was real, yet she was seized by an acute nausea which disappeared only when the meal was finished. She was too honest to attribute it to anything other than anxiety welling up from the “bottom of her personality,” as she expressed it, creeping back from her childhood training. Others have told me similar experiences: of feeling “pangs of conscience,” as one put it, “though my conscience was clearly approving”; or suddenly in the night awaking, overwhelmed by “serious doubts of the wisdom of what we are doing.”

The white women were not alone in these irrational reactions. Colored women also found it hard, but for different reasons. Sometimes their pride was deeply hurt that white women felt so virtuous when eating with them. They were too sensitive not to be aware of the psychic price the white women paid for this forbidden act, and yet too ignorant of the training given white children to understand why there had to be a price. And sometimes the colored women were themselves almost overcome by a break-through not of guilt but of their old repressed hatred of white people. One of the most charming, sensitive, intelligent Negro women I know, tells me that even now when she is long with white people she grows physically ill and has immense difficulty coming to terms with the resentments of her childhood.

Given taboos and resentments that ran so deep, these women of both races should be remembered with pride. Maybe the remarkable thing isn’t that, sixty years later, we still have our Jeremiah Wrights and Pat Buchanans but that we have so few of them.

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