The Issue of Race and Lynching

Abstract

Decades before Alice Walker coined the term womanist that Katie Geneva Cannon and others appropriated theologically, Wells’s tenacity to investigate lynching was, from my vantage point, a gift from God. In fact, her ability to find “truths where everyone else seems afraid to look”¹ is a trait typically shared among individuals who deliberately probe beneath the surface of an issue in order to better understand how the interrelatedness of various dynamics of race, gender, and lynching operate to obscure lessons about strength and hope. For this reason, Wells was convinced that “the A fro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation.”²