For this Socratic Seminar, have students read the Ida B. Well’s speech “Lynching, Our National Crime” which she delivered in 1909 to the organization that would become the NAACP.

After the seminar, lead a reflection in which students answer the following questions:

• In what ways did lynching affect Black communities in the Jim Crow United States?
• How and why did American institutions, including the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court, fail to end racial terrorism and structural racism in the post-Reconstruction South?
• How did Ida B. Well’s anti-lynching campaign set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1960s?