Lynching was an ever-present reality for black Southerners of the late 1800s and first decades of the 1900s. (Not, in fact, until the early 1950s did organizations quit keeping annual records of lynching totals.)

Steadily–but varying by newspaper–the African American press drew its readers’ attention to lynching. The Houston Informer by 1920 referred to the country’s “lynching orgy” which had become “a national pastime and menace” to the point that “. . . it looks like democracy is a hollow mockery” and that the U.S. constitution and the laws of states were “mere ‘scraps of paper.'” The result was that the country was “the most barbarous and uncivilized of all the supposed enlightened nations of the world.” The Informer‘s editorial concluded that “if America has any conscience, it is high time that it becomes awake, for no country can long endure part democratic, part mobocratic and part hellocratic” (July 10, 1918).