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ARCHIVAL (3-29-22):
PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon…

NARRATION: In March 2022, when President Joe Biden signed the nation’s first antilynching law. . . 

ARCHIVAL (3-29-22):
PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN:…the Emmett Till Antilynching Act… Making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history.

NARRATION: …public historian Michelle Duster was there to represent her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, who organized the first campaign to make lynching a federal crime.

ARCHIVAL (3-29-22):
MICHELLE DUSTER: Since my great-grandmother’s visit to the White House 124 years ago, there have been over 200 attempts to get legislation enacted. 

NARRATION: But she wondered, why did it take so long? 

MICHELLE DUSTER (IDA B. WELLS’S GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER): My great-grandmother Ida B. Wells was a journalist, a civil rights activist, a suffragist who fought for freedom, justice and equality.

TEXT ON SCREEN: The Ida B. Wells National Monument, Chicago

MICHELLE DUSTER (LOOKING AT A QUOTE ON THE MONUMENT): This was an image of her when she was older, and these are some of her more famous quotes. “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

NARRATION: Ida B. Wells was one of America’s first investigative journalists. She was born into slavery, and came of age at a unique moment for Black Americans.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Reconstruction Era, 1865-1877

MICHELLE DUSTER: Ida B. Wells grew up during Reconstruction. It was a very brief period of hope and a lot of progress when formerly enslaved African Americans were given rights to own property, to become formally educated, to get involved in the political system. There were just a lot of things that were changed, from being property to actually being somewhat full citizens.

NARRATION: Wells was the co-owner of a newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech.  In 1892, when she was just 29 years old, three of her friends who ran a local grocery store were lynched when a white shop owner, who wanted to put them out of business, provoked a confrontation. 

MICHELLE DUSTER: She decided to write about lynching, and she used her platform to disrupt the status quo. And then she decided to investigate other lynchings to find out how many other innocent people were victims of lynching.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Subject: “Southern Mob Rule.”

KARLOS HILL (HISTORIAN, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA): She would often travel to the site where the lynching occurred. She would interview as many people as she could to get a full picture, right, of what happened. Wells wrote three pamphlets across the 1890s to bring attention to the ways lynch victims were not receiving justice.

NARRATION: In her pamphlet “A Red Record,” Wells told the story of Henry Smith, who was accused of killing a child. He was never tried, but was burned alive as a crowd looked on. “Never,” she wrote, “has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality and indescribable barbarism as … the people of Paris, Texas… on the first of February, 1893.”

MICHELLE DUSTER: A lot of people actually thought that whoever was lynched, well, they must’ve done some kind of crime, right? But that’s not what she found.

NARRATION: Her investigations identified dozens of arbitrary reasons given to explain why someone was lynched.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
Lynching Justifications:
unknown cause
keeping saloon
practicing voodooism
gambling
having smallpox
turning state’s evidence
informing
to prevent giving evidence
self-defense
political causes

MARGARET BURNHAM (PROFESSOR, NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW): It could be the slightest thing that could kick off this horrific violence, terrifying entire communities. People across the South often thought that lynchings were necessary to hold the Black community in check. 

MICHELLE DUSTER: She found, time and time again, the people who were lynched were innocent people who were either pushing the boundaries of what the social structure was at that time, or they were a convenient scapegoat for a crime that somebody else committed.

NARRATION: One powerful example: the case of John Peterson from South Carolina, who was lynched in 1893. Through stories like his, Wells exposed the lies that portrayed Black men as criminals and riled up fear that they were dangerous to white women.

MICHELLE DUSTER: She wrote, “Although the white woman in the case said he was not the man, he was hanged and over a thousand bullets fired into his body on the declaration that, quote, ‘a crime had been committed and someone had to hang for it.’ “

KARLOS HILL: Lynching was not just killing Black people in public, it was a form of racialized terror to maintain the status quo or to maintain Jim Crow segregation and other forms of racial oppression. 

MICHELLE DUSTER: It was absolute lawlessness. It was vigilante acts of murder  where somebody would just get their friends and go out and kill somebody outside of any kind of judge, jury, any kind of trial, anything like that.   

NARRATION: Lynchers were rarely if ever punished by state or local authorities. So Wells began building a case for lynching to become a federal crime.

KARLOS HILL: Her commentary was not only powerful, it was explosive. And she was unflinching when it came to telling the truth.

MICHELLE DUSTER: She felt lynching needed to be banned, and believed that if people knew the truth then that would lead to change.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Anti-lynching Protest

NARRATION: In 1909 Wells helped found the civil rights organization the N.A.A.C.P. One of their primary goals was an antilynching bill. As part of the campaign, she sent Congress a map, showing in bright red the number of lynchings in each state between 1889 and 1921.

MARGARET BURNHAM: Whenever there was a lynching, there was always someone who would say, well, this was completely justified. And that was common across the South. But also it was expressed in the halls of Congress.

KARLOS HILL: There were three times that the House of Representatives passed an antilynching bill, in 1922, 1935 and 1940. Unfortunately those efforts were stymied by Southern senators.

NARRATION: The Southern senators were so powerful that in 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that he couldn’t support the legislation for fear it would jeopardize his agenda in Congress.

ARCHIVAL (1959):
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (FIRST LADY): I said well now, I feel very strongly about the antilynching bill. He explained that he could not make that bill a must because he had to have the Southern vote.

NARRATION: Eventually the public became less tolerant of lynching, in part because of the awareness created by Ida B. Wells and the N.A.A.C.P.

KARLOS HILL: Their activism did have an appreciable impact on American attitudes. And so lynching as a kind of social practice that terrorized African Americans dies out by the 1960s.

NARRATION: There were further efforts to pass antilynching legislation. . .

ARCHIVAL (UNITED STATES SENATE, 3-7-22):
SPEAKER: The Senate will proceed to the measure. . .

NARRATION: . . . but it did not succeed until 2022. . .

ARCHIVAL:
PROTESTERS: We want justice! We want justice!

NARRATION: . . . in the wake of nationwide protests over police killings of Black Americans.

ARCHIVAL:
PROTESTERS: Black lives matter! Black lives matter! 

ARCHIVAL:
PROTESTERS: Police violence no more! 

ARCHIVAL:
PROTESTERS: The system is guilty as hell!

MICHELLE DUSTER: The day that the legislation was signed by Joe Biden was an amazing day for me.

ARCHIVAL (3-29-22):
PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: Thank you for never giving up. Never, ever giving up.

MICHELLE DUSTER: The most important lessons, I think, from Ida B. Wells’s life and work are that, you know, one person can make a difference, and justice is worth fighting for. She would have been very happy to see that what she worked for actually happened. But I think she would have been surprised that it took so long.

(END)