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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is the Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In January of 1900, the time when racial terrorism across the South increased sharply, George Henry White of North Carolina was the lone Black member in the House of Representatives. To address the violent lynching of black people at the hands of mobs, George White introduced a bill to make lynching a federal crime, one that would be punishable by death. White's bill failed to make it out of committee and the path ahead for a federal anti-lynching bill would ultimately stretch on for more than a century, blocked from passing on more than 200 occasions.

On June 4th, 2020, Senator Rand Paul obstructed a piece of anti-lynching legislation sponsored by then Senator Kamala Harris, along with senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott. According to Paul, the bill's definition of lynching was too expansive.

Rand Paul: To suggest that lynching would only be a lynching if someone's heart was pulled out and produced and displayed to someone else is ridiculous. On this day, the day of George Floyd's funeral, on this day, a day that should be a day of national mourning.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Last week, after some amending to get Senator Paul on board, the Senate finally passed federal anti-lynching legislation named the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. It was passed with unanimous consent.

Mover: I asked unanimous consent that the bill be considered, read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Speaker: Without objection.

Paula Giddings: Of course, it's a momentous historic occasion that was passed. I also couldn't help but think about out how long it's taken.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Historian Paula Giddings, Professor Emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College, an author of Ida: A Sword Among Lions, a biography of Ida B. Wells, took the long view on the passage of this bill.

Professor Giddings: It's been 130 years since Ida B. Wells began the first anti-lynching campaign, and 112 years since she's a co-founder of the NAACP. In 1910, at it's first annual conference, she gives a speech asking the NAACP to support federal anti-lynching legislation. She gives a speech called Lynching Our National Crime, saying that lynching now is a national issue, not just a Southern issue. It's a national issue and so needs federal legislation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I turned to Professor Giddings to learn more about the role that anti-lynching activists and journalist Ida B. Wells had played in calling attention to lynching more than a century ago. Professor Giddings told me that an essential part of Wells' work was to correct some major misconceptions about why so many Black people were being lynched by white mobs.

Professor Giddings: It is true, and she admitted herself in her autobiography, that with these charges of Black men raping white women and of rising criminality reported in the news, she and others were wondering what happened suddenly, the reporting. They're wondering, “What is going on? Are Blacks really doing this?” I think we've had even some more contemporary parallels with this when we hear about Black criminality. Are they really doing it? What is going on? She wasn't sure. Then as she does her investigative reporting and she sees what's really going on, she really understands this new idea of Blacks being criminalized in the press, of fictive notions around Black criminality in the press. She begins to bring that out.

As a result of the investigative reporting, she also begins to understand, and as you mentioned, the lynching of her friend in Memphis, who's really guilty of having a successful grocery store that competes with a white man's grocery store. That really what lynching really is and what racial violence in general really is, is terrorism to keep Blacks down.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What did Ida Wells hope that federal anti-lynching legislation would do?

Professor Giddings: A couple of things. One is, she wrote essay called Enfranchisement Stops Lynching. She wanted the legislation to, one, there was such complicity of officials, including sheriffs and state officials and others lynching. As a result, it had become legitimatized in many ways because authorities were involved in it. As you would say, the South and the North best men, the so-called best citizens, were often involved in lynching. She wanted anti-lynching legislation also to criminalize officials who were involved in lynching, was one thing.

The other thing is, she understood that anti-lynching legislation, also we had the means to actually show what was really going on through legislation if you could prosecute legally what was happening to Blacks. Remember, lynching is extra-legal. Mobs could just form, and a mob could be just three or more people, could just form and kill someone with impunity. Legislation would begin to bar and minimize that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here we are all this time later. Certainly, there continues to be racial violence, but this is not Ida B Wells' America, in some ways, at least, happily, and largely because of the work that she and others did. I'm wondering what the value of the anti-lynching legislation is for us in this moment.

Professor Giddings: One of the things certainly it does is shine a light on the status and what is happening to African-Americans in the society even now. Of course, this recent lynching legislation is in the wake of Charlottesville of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, of Ahmaud Arbery. I started thinking about all the other times that lynching really becomes in the forefront of the American consciousness. It's always been in the wake of some terrible tragedy. In 1892, when Well starts her campaign, lynching was reaching a new height in the late 19th century.

In 1900, when George White of North Carolina really proposes the first anti-lynching legislation, it was in the wake of Wilmington Massacre in Wilmington North Carolina, where hundreds of Black people were killed, including middle-class community, was just leveled and devastated. In 1910, when Ida Wells proposes first federal anti-lynching legislation, this is in the wake of the founding of the NAACP, which the catalyst is the terrible Springfield Riot of 1908. Another time when the Black community is actually leveled and hundreds are killed and thousands are forced to flee.

Later, of course, in 1921 when anti-lynching legislation comes closest to being realized, because the House did actually pass that legislation, but it got bogged down with southerners in the Senate. In 1921, it was in the shadow of the Red Summer of 1919, where white supremacist terrorism really emerged in three dozen cities across the country within that year, with major riots in places like Chicago and Washington DC. In some ways, this legislation is also a way to measure really still the difficulty of African-Americans under white supremacist terrorism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: So often the story of lynching in our public memory is a story of white male mobs that descend upon Black male victims in exactly the way that Ida Wells devastated in her actual research. The narrative would be a sexual crime against a white woman, but left unspoken in all of this is where Black women were and I'm just wondering also about the ways that our public memory tends to erase both Black women activists like Ida Wells and others who were so central to bringing about this moment more than 100 years later and Black women who were victims, Black women and girls who were violently murdered by lynch mobs.

Professor Giddings: Ida Wells also wrote about Black women who were lynched and probably a very conservative estimate. Melissa is that some 200 women at least were lynched between 1880 and 1930. Ida Wells wrote about them as well, but she also deconstructed the idea of who was really being raped. She linked lynching with rape, but not with the rape of white women, but the rape of Black women. Also talked about that in her discourse. The very first time she wrote about lynching which was before 1892, it was about the lynching of a Black woman who was her name was Eliza Woods we should call her name in 1882, who was accused of killing, of poisoning her mistress and who was taken from the jail, stripped.

Ida Wells describes this, stripped naked, hung in a courthouse yard and her body was riddled with bullets and the body was just left there. This was her first really consciousness around the brutality of lynching. Black women were lynched too, but also Black women sought as a Black women's issue because women particularly in the Victorian period of then, really embody racist sexuality. If men are considered bestial and hypersexual and monstrous it's because they're women with that.

When Ida is defending Black men, she's also defending Black women and that's very important. Black women had a tremendous stake in anti-lynching and of course even contemporary there were also mothers of men who were lynched and female relatives of men who were lynched, but this was also if you understood lynching and could unpack lynching, you would unpack all of those horrible stereotypes around not just Black men but around Black women as well, which is why Black women, when Ida Wells starts that campaign in 1892, Black women support her en masse and that's why the National Association of Colored Women are even supporting anti-lynching legislation even before the NAACP is founded and later before the NAACP really gets on that really supports anti-lynching in a full-throated way.

It's very important to understand that Black women is very much involved and very much responsible for the rise of consciousness around lynching and violence that goes beyond individual victims, but also what it says about them, about the community and about Black people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Paula Giddings, professor Emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College and author of Ida, a Sword Among Lions. Thank you so much.

Professor Giddings: Thank you so much.

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