Ida B. Wells: 1909 Speech for the NAACP

East Lynne Theater Company presents Stephanie Garrett reading a speech by Ida B. Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931), “Lynching, Our National Crime,” which was filmed at the Cape May Presbyterian Church in Cape May, NJ. Wells delivered this speech at the National Negro Conference (forerunner to the NAACP) in NYC in the spring of 1909. Her work began in the early 1890s, and by 1909, she was the most prominent anti-lynching campaigner in the United States. She received a Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 2020 for her outstanding and courageous reporting. This award is posthumous, but timely. Based on her investigations, she wrote that “ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood (through lynching) without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.”