Seth Kaller, Inc.

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Inventory #27068       Price: $3,750

Historical Background
In November 1930, twenty-six elite white women met in Atlanta, Georgia, and organized the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). The group declared that “Lynching is an indefensible crime. Women dare no longer allow themselves to be the cloak behind which those bent upon personal revenge and savagery commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women. We repudiate this disgraceful claim for all time.” Over the next decade, more than 40,000 southern women signed a similar statement. In 1939, the ASWPL declared that of the 4,297 persons lynched since 1886, only 21 percent had been charged with sexual assault or crimes against white women.

Organized through affiliated state and local associations, the ASWPL had groups in all southern states except Florida by April 1931. It began holding annual meetings in 1931 and adopted the following formal resolution in 1934: “We declare as our deliberate conclusion that the crime of lynching is a logical result in every community that pursues the policy of humiliation and degradation of a part of its citizenship because of accident of birth; that exploits and intimidates the weaker element...for economic gain; that refuses equal educational opportunity to one portion of its children; that segregates arbitrarily a whole race...and finally that denies a voice in the control of government to any fit and proper citizen because of race.”

In 1938, police officers and sheriffs, many of whom had pledged in writing to support the ASWPL’s goals, prevented forty known attempts at lynchings. The ASWPL also demanded thorough investigations of any mob killings of African Americans, so the perpetrators could not keep their activities secret.

In 1940, the ASWPL opposed an anti-lynching bill in Congress, preferring that anti-lynching efforts be focused in the states. The Association supported continued education, increased membership, and the cooperation of law enforcement and the media to prevent lynchings.

A parallel broadside regarding lynchings between 1882 and 1936 pointed out that whites were also victims of lynchings. It showed that 28.6 percent of 4,852 lynchings in that period had been of white persons, ranging from 49 percent of all lynchings from 1882 to 1892 to 8.3 percent from 1904-1914. The graphics from both broadsides appeared in the pamphlet “Feeling Is Tense,” published by the ASWPL in February 1938.

Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (1930-1942) was an association of elite white women founded by suffragist and civil rights leader Jessie Daniel Ames (1883-1972). A Texas native, Ames founded the Association with twenty-five other prominent southern women in Atlanta in November 1930. It accepted only white women as members because the organizers believed that “only white women could influence other white women. Loosely organized, the association eventually had a presence in every county of the South. Ames and the Association rejected the common rationale that lynchings “protected” white women and pointed out that the rape of white women by black men seldom occurred and that the true motivation for lynching was racial hatred. The Association eventually grew to more than 100 affiliated associations with a membership of some four million women. In May 1940, the ASWPL celebrated twelve months without lynching, and the year before, there had been only three. Convinced that the Association’s purposes had been achieved, Ames dissolved it in 1942.

Condition: Professionally conserved.