Just over 100 years ago, James Weldon Johnson joined the effort to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill H.R. 11279. Originally introduced by William Monroe Trotter and Hubert Harrison and ultimately supported by the NAACP, the legislation aimed to make the lynching of private citizens a federal crime.
Johnson joined the NAACP in late 1916 as a field secretary and went on to become the organization’s first black executive secretary. Central to the NAACP’s efforts were founders W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey, a Harvard University graduate and trained lawyer.
In the early 1920s, Miss Ovington opened her Alford home in the summers to James Weldon Johnson and his wife, Grace, so they could find the balance to relax and rejuvenate until they bought their own piece of comfort on Alford Road that they called “Five Acres” in Great Barrington.
Johnson’s leadership helped to grow the NAACP’s membership in the South. Johnson advocated for civil rights and demanded justice using the law. In 1919, the NAACP released a comprehensive report of over three thousand lynchings of African-Americans, entitled, “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918.” The report aided congressional lobbying efforts. In 1922, the Dyer Bill passed the House but failed the Senate. Many similar bills followed suit from 1882 to 1968.
One hundred years later, the “Emmett Till Antilynching Act” H.R 55 passed the House on Monday, February 28, 2022. This week the legislation passed in the Senate, where it died two years ago after passing the House.
Two weeks prior, I read an opinion piece in the Berkshire Eagle about Elizabeth Freeman that was written by the Berkshire County Chapter of the NAACP. My emailed response to the NAACP led to a discussion with chapter president Dennis Powell and his colleagues at Clinton Church Restoration about telling Black stories in the Berkshires and beyond. The African American cultural heritage center that the project is developing at the former Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church in Great Barrington, will house exhibits and programming that educate the public about W.E.B. Du Bois and the Berkshires’ rich Black history, as well as this freedom church’s 150-year-history of speaking out against lynching and racial injustice.
(Please click here to see a related story from The Berkshire Edge’s Berkshires Calendar magazine titled “Black Berkshires: A hidden and not-so-hidden legacy.”
As president of the James Weldon Johnson Foundation, I left feeling hopeful that our organizations can work together to advance these legacies by re-connecting the spirit of Du Bois, Johnson, and Wells and those white Americans, like Storey, Dyer, and Ovington, whose spirits are kindred.
Like Moorfield Storey and William Monroe Trotter, I am a Harvard graduate. Like James Weldon Johnson, I am a Black Southern man and a lifetime member of the NAACP. Like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, I am informed by the abhorrent lynching history of Memphis, Tenn., my hometown. Like Billie Holiday, I am using music to cry out.
Why now? In December 2021, I was invited by MusicInCommon.org to perform a “re-imagining of Strange Fruit” at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, Mass., which took place on March 6th. The “anti-lynching” song was popularized by Billie Holiday and written by Du Bois’ friend Abel Meeropol in the late 1930s. Let us use music to further the cause for which the anti-lynching bill ultimately passed.
Rufus E. Jones, Jr., the president of the James Weldon Johnson Foundation, and his wife, Jill, currently own “Five Acres” in Great Barrington and are working to preserve and rehabilitate the site.
