Postwar mass black protest met White House silence on lynching

Evidence

Christine S. Smith, president of the NACW, along with 300 other women marched on the White House demanding a federal response to the horrors of lynching and “justice [for] the perpetrators of the Georgia crime.” The women held the picket line for a week. At one point, as more women joined the protest, about 500 of them stormed into the Capitol. They wanted to see their senators. Their protests would be joined by others, horrified by the deaths in Monroe. The National Negro Congress led a march of more than a thousand people from Union Station to the White House to protest President Truman’s relative silence regarding the violence. More than 15,000 people took to the streets in New York and another 15,000 marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand anti-lynching legislation. Between June of 1945 and September of 1946, fifty-six black people were murdered in acts of racial violence. White southerners were killing black people (particularly black veterans) with impunity and the Truman administration refused to do anything about it. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 443