The 9th crusade: Women Anti-lynching movement 

March is Women’s History Month. NY1920s always centers women’s history; this month we’ll do so a bit more emphatically.

One hundred years ago today … The Ninth Crusade, a Black women-organized and Black women-led anti-lynching campaign, was featured in the Crisis. The journal chronicled the founding of the group by Helen Curtis, and announced the results of its first campaign. This seems to be the same organization that was sometimes called the Crusaders. (See our post about October 24, 1922 here.)

Note: the page reproduced below includes images of swastikas. The Crisis routinely used swastikas, which had not yet become symbols of genocide and Aryan supremacy–though they would soon: Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois noted in a 1924 letter that “anti-semites of Europe” had made the swastika “their especial symbol.”

Photos and names of 48 women, the organization's executive committee members and state directors, accompanied the report.

We wrote about about the 1920s scourge that was lynching in posts about Madeline Allison's reports on lynching in 1920 and 1921, James Weldon Johnson on lynchings in June, 1920, Claude McKay’s poem “The Lynching” in July, 1920, and an attempted lynching in NYC in November, 1922. 

– Jonathan Goldman, March 16, 2023

TAGS: Women's History Month, Black women, African American history, gender, race, violence, activism, organizing, lynching, female, journalism, media, white supremacy