9. She Fought for an Anti-Lynching Bill
Madam C. J. Walker was a strong proponent of anti-lynching efforts. She gave the NAACP their largest single donation, at that time, of $5,000 (over $62,000 today) to support their anti-lynching efforts. In July 2017, Walker was spurred to additional action after a mob of whites murdered more than three dozen Black Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois. The three-day race riots in the city ultimately left almost 200 Black Americans dead.
The NAACP and Harlem, New York community leaders responded to the race riots by drafting an anti-lynching bill for the United States Congress. Walker strongly supported the bill and even traveled to Washington D.C. to ask for President Woodrow Wilson’s support. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given both the tepid police response to the race riots and Wilson’s unabashedly racist outlook, he did not support the bill, and it died on the floor in Congress.
Lynchings continued for decades in the United States, with the murder of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in 1955 being the most widely recognized example. One of the last lynchings in the United States was within many of our lifetimes, occurring in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. Michael Donald, 20 years of age, was beaten and lynched by several members of the Ku Klux Klan. One of his assailants was ultimately executed for the murder, becoming the only KKK member to be executed for his crimes in the entire 20th century.