Anti-Lynching Activism as Abolition: The Rape Myth and its Combatants

This paper argues that anti-lynching campaigns should be understood within the historical tradition of abolitionist movements in the United States and as a resource for our contemporary abolitionist future. Spectacle lynchings in the South relied on myths of Black southerners’ inherent criminality and were enabled by sheriffs and the broader penal apparatus. By challenging the racial tethering of criminality to Blackness and critiquing the state’s role in mob violence, anti-lynching activists engaged in abolitionist practice. Examining anti-lynching activism as abolition, however, complicates the contemporary abolitionist demand for nonreformist reforms. To grapple with this tension, this paper compares the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). It further interprets lynching as a religious practice and anti-lynching activism as a competing theology that challenged the moral order sustaining racial violence.