The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of America

Abstract

This essay traces a tradition in civil rights that begins with the NAACP's media campaign to fight unjust racial violence between 1909 and 1925, instead of with the education desegregation litigation of the 1950s and 1960s. I recover this earlier period by analyzing the activities of the NAACP's anti-lynching and mob violence reduction campaign during the first quarter of the 20th century. The organization's effort to secure African American equality centered on changing public opinion as the NAACP maintained that lynching could be stopped when it “reached the heart and conscience of the American people.” In order to wage a battle against negative public perceptions, this essay describes how the NAACP executed a three-pronged media strategy focused on writing newspaper articles, publishing pamphlets, and printing its own magazine, The Crisis. By articulating the terror of lynching and broadcasting it to a wider audience through these different channels, the NAACP achieved considerable success in reframing the debate concerning African American criminality and American justice in a period overlooked by most scholars.