C.T.U. Convention at Cleveland, November 5, 1894, a
studied, unjust and wholly unwarranted attack upon our work.

In her address Miss Willard said:

The zeal for her race of Miss Ida B. Wells, a bright young colored
woman, has, it seems to me, clouded her perception as to who were her
friends and well-wishers in all high-minded and legitimate efforts to
banish the abomination of lynching and torture from the land of the free
and the home of the brave. It is my firm belief that in the statements
made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative
in nameless acts between the races she has put an imputation upon half
the white race in this country that is unjust, and, save in the rarest
exceptional instances, wholly without foundation. This is the unanimous
opinion of the most disinterested and observant leaders of opinion whom
I have consulted on the subject, and I do not fear to say that the
laudable efforts she is making are greatly handicapped by statements of
this kind, nor to urge her as a friend and well-wisher to banish from
her vocabulary all such allusions as a source of weakness to the cause
she has at heart.

This paragraph, brief as it is, contains two statements which have not the
slightest foundation in fact. At no time, nor in any place, have I made
statements "concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless
acts between the races." Further, at no time, or place nor under any
circumstance, have I directly or inferentially "put an imputation upon
half the white race in this country" and I challenge this "friend and
well-wisher" to give proof of the truth of her charge. Miss Willard
protests against lynching in one paragraph and then, in the next,
deliberately misrepresents my position in order that she may criticise a
movement, whose only purpose is to protect our oppressed race from
vindictive slander and Lynch Law.

What I have said and what I now repeat--in answer to her first charge--is,
that colored men have been lynched for assault upon women, when the facts
were plain that the relationship between the victim lynched and the
alleged victim of his assault was voluntary, clandestine and illicit. For
that very reason we maintain, that, in every section of our land, the
accused should have a fair, impartial trial, so that a man who is colored
shall not be hanged for an offense, which, if he were white, would not be
adjudged a crime. Facts c