SOURCE: Grant, Donald L. “The Role of the Press, Education, and the Church in the Anti-lynching Reform.” In The Anti-lynching Movement: 1883-1932, pp. 76-103. San Francisco, Calif.: R and E Research Associates, 1975.

In the following excerpt, Grant examines the treatment of lynching in both the white and black press.

In the 1880s the press was divided on the question of lynching along the same lines that the country was divided. The Black press uniformly opposed lynching, while the white press usually ignored it, excused it, or sometimes encouraged it. The Black press was weak, its readership small, and its editors and printing plants were subject to violence if the protest was too vehement. By the 1890s the larger metropolitan white newspapers started to become more factual in their coverage then developing that lynching was a form of anarchy which could spread to threaten white society if not checked...