The Eyes of the World Are upon Us

This chapter analyses how black women living in Washington, D.C. in the 1920s and early 1930s worked hard to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Over a period of fifteen years, women employed a range of protest tactics, including petitions, pickets, prayer meetings, congressional testimony, and a Silent Parade. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922, but it died in the Senate. Four years later, two women testified in the Senate about the urgency of passing anti-lynching legislation, which reflected the growing visibility of black women in politics. But when activists protested the erasure of lynching at the National Crime Conference in 1934, they recognized that police brutality in the nation’s capital needed to be a political priority. Many of the veterans of anti-lynching activism turned toward eradicating interracial police violence in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s.