Black people did not sit idly by during this segregationist organizing. Black resistance caused lynchings to spike in the early 1890s. However, the White lynchers justified the spike in lynchings as corresponding to a spike in Black crime. This justification was accepted by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, by the middle-aged, ambitious principle of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, and by a dying Frederick Douglass.
