t there was already a lynching
resolution in the hands of the committee. Mrs. Fessenden yielded the floor
on that assurance, and no resolution of any kind against lynching was
submitted and none was voted upon, not even the one above, taken from the
columns of the _Union Signal_, the organ of the national W.C.T.U!

Even the wording of this resolution which was printed by the W.C.T.U.,
reiterates the false and unjust charge which has been so often made as an
excuse for lynchers. Statistics show that less than one-third of the
lynching victims are hanged, shot and burned alive for "unspeakable
outrages against womanhood, maidenhood and childhood;" and that nearly a
thousand, including women and children, have been lynched upon any pretext
whatsoever; and that all have met death upon the unsupported word of white
men and women. Despite these facts this resolution which was printed,
cloaks an apology for lawlessness, in the same paragraph which affects to
condemn it, where it speaks of "the unspeakable outrages which have so
often provoked such lawlessness."

Miss Willard told me the day before the resolutions were offered that the
Southern women present had held a caucus that day. This was after I, as
fraternal delegate from the Woman's Mite Missionary Society of the A.M.E.
Church at Cleveland, O., had been introduced to tender its greetings. In
so doing I expressed the hope of the colored women that the W.C.T.U. would
place itself on record as opposed to lynching which robbed them of
husbands, fathers, brothers and sons and in many cases of women as well.
No note was made either in the daily papers or the _Union Signal_ of that
introduction and greeting, although every other incident of that morning
was published. The failure to submit a lynching resolution and the wording
of the one above appears to have been the result of that Southern caucus.

On the same day I had a private talk with Miss Willard and told her she
had been unjust to me and the cause in her annual address, and asked that
she correct the statement that I had misrepresented the W.C.T.U, or that I
had "put an imputation on one-half the white race in this country." She
said that somebody in England told her it was a pity that I attacked the
white women of America. "Oh," said I, "then you went out of your way to
prejudice me and my cause in your annual address, not upon what you had
heard me say, but what somebody had told you I said?" Her reply was that I