The Fight Against Lynching: Anti-Lynching Work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the Year Nineteen Eighteen

In Short

This text is the official 1918 annual report of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Anti-Lynching Committee. Compiled by executive officers including Secretary John R. Shillady and Director W. E. B. Du Bois, it catalogues sixty-seven extrajudicial murders across sixteen states, detailing the victims, the fabricated or minor offenses alleged against them, and the failure of local law enforcement. It stands as an enduring historical document because it captures the birth of modern civil rights advocacy—using systematic research, field investigation, targeted press campaigns, and political agitation to expose systemic lawlessness to the national conscience.

The Story

The report opens by establishing the organizational and financial framework of the anti-lynching campaign. Initiated with seed money from Boston philanthropist Philip G. Peabody and NAACP President Moorfield Storey, the committee sets out to raise ten thousand dollars annually to sustain its operations. The work relies on a multi-pronged strategy: dispatching field investigators to mob sites, publishing detailed reports, firing off telegraphic protests to governors and local officials, enlisting regional chambers of commerce, and maintaining constant national publicity through news outlets and the association’s official journal, The Crisis.

Moving from procedure to historical context, the text charts the horrific scope of mob violence. Between 1885 and 1917, over 3,700 lynchings occurred in the United States, with African Americans bearing an overwhelming and increasing proportion of the violence. For the single year of 1918, the record documents sixty-three Black victims and four white victims. The report reveals how mob terror operates in practice: officers surrender prisoners or look away, court houses become sites of extrajudicial executions, and white press outlets cover up local massacres. In Georgia’s Brooks and Lowndes Counties, a five-day spree results in the murder of ten people, including Mary Turner, a pregnant woman killed with exceptional savagery. In Texas, a mother and her five children are shot to death after their cabin is set on fire.

Against this horrific background, the narrative tracks the committee’s relentless counter-campaign. Staff members conduct boots-on-the-ground investigations in places like Fayetteville, Georgia, and Estill Springs, Tennessee. The national office pressures high-level authorities, sending formal memoranda to President Woodrow Wilson and the Attorney General. When President Wilson releases a public statement condemning mob violence in July 1918, the report notes both its symbolic value and its practical limitations on the ground.

The narrative reaches its resolution by demonstrating how national exposure breaks the wall of local silence. Though many grand juries refuse to indict lynchers, persistent publicity begins to force cracks in the system. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, local authorities and a federal military unit successfully defend a jail against a mob, leading to rare prison sentences for the rioters. In Alabama, state officials launch grand jury investigations after national pressure. The document concludes with a complete, sobering chronological record of every documented 1918 lynching, followed by the NAACP’s founding platform—a direct call for legal justice, total political emancipation, and an end to racial terror.

How It Unfolds

The campaign takes shape The report outlines the establishment of the Anti-Lynching Committee, funded by private donations to launch investigations and press campaigns. It details the operational methods used to combat mob violence across the country.

The national record is established Statistical evidence traces decades of extrajudicial killings, demonstrating that Black Americans carry an ever-increasing burden of mob violence. The data exposes lynching as an epidemic rather than a series of isolated events.

The 1918 atrocities are documented Specific cases from the past year illustrate the brutal reality of racial terror, including the murder of women, the burning of victims, and the public spectacle of mob murder. The text details incidents where local authorities actively colluded with mobs.

Publicity meets resistance The association sends dozens of telegrams and press stories to governors, law officers, and business leaders. Southern editors and local power structures react with hostility, accusing outside organizers of meddling in local affairs.

Legal precedent begins to shift A few state executives and law enforcement officers take unprecedented steps to stop mobs and prosecute ringleaders. The report captures rare victories where federal troops protect prisoners and judges hand down actual prison sentences to lynchers.

The full ledger is exposed The text closes with a stark, month-by-month chronological log listing every victim, location, and pretext from 1918. It links these specific horrors directly to the NAACP's broader institutional program for full civil rights.

The People

• John R. Shillady – The Secretary of the NAACP who signs the report and coordinates national campaigns. He directs telegraphic inquiries, authors investigative pamphlets, and personally attends trials in the South to confront legal systems that excuse mob ringleaders.
• W. E. B. Du Bois – Director of Publications and Research and editor of The Crisis. He investigates major atrocities, such as the East St. Louis massacre, and uses the association’s print media to bring unvarnished facts to a national readership.
• Moorfield Storey – President of the NAACP and prominent legal figure. He funds the early anti-lynching campaign and delivers key legal addresses, such as "The Negro Question," distributing them to members of Congress and state governors to demand equal protection under the law.
• Mary Turner – A pregnant Black woman murdered by a Georgia mob during a brutal five-day rampage in Brooks and Lowndes Counties. Her death serves as one of the most horrifying examples in the report of mob cruelty and institutional failure.
• Governor Thomas W. Bickett – The Governor of North Carolina who responds to NAACP protests by supporting investigations and, in a rare act of executive intervention, secures federal military assistance to defend a local jail against a lynching mob.

In Its Own Voice

"In the absence of combined action by Negroes forcibly to protect members of their race, the lynching of black men and women by white men for all causes and no cause, so far as crimes are concerned, can only be compared, although in lesser degree, to Russian pogroms against Jews under the Tzarist regime, or to Turkish attacks upon the Armenians."

This passage frames the domestic terror of lynching not as isolated criminal acts, but as a systematic campaign of state-sanctioned racial persecution.

"The coroner's jury ran true to form, finding that the victim came to his death at the hands of 'parties unknown' to the jury."

With dry irony, the report notes how local legal institutions routinely shield violent mobs from accountability.

"Unless the colored child can be educated he is at a fearful disadvantage. An uneducated Negro population menaces national well-being."

Found in the concluding platform, this statement ties the fight against physical violence directly to the broader struggle for educational and civic equality.

What It's Really About

This book is about the power of documented truth to dismantle systemic injustice. Beyond listing crimes, it critiques how local law enforcement, grand juries, and southern news outlets act as co-conspirators in mob violence through active participation or intentional silence. The report argues that lynching is not a response to crime, but a mechanism of racial control that thrives wherever communities countenance it. By gathering verified names, dates, and pretexts, the NAACP seeks to strip away the myths surrounding mob violence. The underlying question is whether a constitutional democracy can survive when a whole class of citizens is denied equal protection under the law and stripped of the power to elect the judges, sheriffs, and prosecutors who govern their lives.

Why Read It Today

This text is indispensable for readers interested in civil rights history, legal advocacy, and documentary journalism. Reading it feels like sitting in the executive offices of early civil rights strategists, watching them transform raw horror into actionable evidence. The prose is clear, urgent, and deliberate, free from unnecessary embellishment because the bare facts are horrifying enough.

It is not an easy read. The report deals directly with extreme violence, including the murder of children and pregnant women, burning at the stake, and public torture. Furthermore, the work reflects the formal administrative style of early twentieth-century organizational reports, heavily reliant on data tables, telegraph summaries, and chronological lists. Yet this precise, formal structure is exactly what makes the document so powerful. It demonstrates how early activists used rigorous methodology and public exposure to force a reluctant nation to confront its darkest realities, offering a masterclass in how institutional transparency can be weaponized against state-sanctioned violence.