had protested against the licensing of saloons, inveighed against tobacco, pledged its allegiance to the Prohibition party, and thanked the Populist party in Kansas, the Republican party in California and the Democratic party in the South, wholly ignored the seven millions of colored people of this country whose plea was for a word of sympathy and support for the movement in their behalf.  The resolution was not adopted, and the convention adjourned.

In the Union Signal Dec. 6, 1894, among the resolutions is found this one: 

Resolved, That the National W.C.T.U, which has for years counted among its departments that of peace and arbitration, is utterly opposed to all lawless acts in any and all parts of our common lands and it urges these principles upon the public, praying that the time may speedily come when no human being shall be condemned without due process of law; and when the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness shall be banished from the world, and childhood, maidenhood and womanhood shall no more be the victims of atrocities worse than death.

This is not the resolution offered by Mrs. Fessenden.  She offered the one passed last year by the W.C.T.U. which was a strong unequivocal denunciation of lynching.  But she was told by the chairman of the committee on resolutions, Mrs. Rounds, that 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.