too proud to relay the horrific graphic details of
the lynching in which he has played an active role.
When he produces an unidentifiable black object
wrapped in a handkerchief to Little Jim, their son,
Lizzie is thoroughly traumatized. She fails to re-
spond to the neighbors who remind her of the re-
cent violence or to the desperate, unidentified
African-American woman who beseeches her for
help in the wake of white violence against her fam-
ily and home.
As the short story closes, Lizzie murders her
daughter Bessie. She chooses to kill her daughter,
rather than her son or husband, because she
imagines Bessie as the object of potential vio-
lence. When her husband discovers the body, he
assumes immediately that the killer is an African
American and plans to launch another murder-
ous spree to lynch the perpetrator. The sheriff ul-
timately convinces him that his own wife is the
villain.
Cuthbert’s story complemented the efforts to
protest and outlaw lynching by THECRISISand its
parent organization, the NATIONALASSOCIATION
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OFCOLOREDPEOPLE.
The story also was part of the significant body of
antilynching works by writers such as GEORGIA
DOUGLASJOHNSON,MARYBURRILL, and RIDGELY
TORRENCE.
Bibliography
Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red
Record of American Literature, 1890–1912. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Harris, Trudier. Exorcizing Blackness: Historical and Liter-
ary Lynching and Burning Rituals.Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1984.
Mohammed Ali, Duse(1867–unknown)
A journalist and pan-Africanist and one of the per-
sons who most influenced MARCUSGARVEY. The
two men met in London in the early 1900s, and
Garvey worked as a messenger for Mohammed
when the latter founded Africa and Orient Review,
a monthly anticolonization journal.
Mohammed, who was of Sudanese and Egyptian
descent, later worked as a foreign affairs expert for
NEGROWORLD,the official newspaper of Garvey’s
UNIVERSALNEGROIMPROVEMENTASSOCIATION.
Bibliography
Adi, Hakim. Pan-African History: Political Figures from
Africa and the Diaspora since 1787.London: Rout-
ledge, 2003.
Cronon, Edmund. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Gar-
vey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Martin, Tony. The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery
to Garvey and Beyond.Dover, Mass.: Majority Press,
1984.Moods: A Book of VerseIdabelle Yeiser
(1937)
A volume of poetry by IDABELLE YEISER,a
COLUMBIAUNIVERSITYPh.D., Dillard University
professor, and member of the active literary circle
in PHILADELPHIAduring the Harlem Renaissance
period.
Published in Philadelphia by the Colony Press,
the collection was Yeiser’s first published book of
poetry. It included an array of works and was di-
vided into five sections. Poems appeared in cate-
gories devoted to nature, children, love, and
philosophy and included another with short works
entitled Miniatures.
The collection revealed Yeiser’s impatience
with social and racial hypocrisy, her interest in
considering the status of women, and her specula-
tions about family life.Moody Bible Institute
The CHICAGOreligious school established in 1889
by Dwight Lyman Moody, a Northfield, MAS-
SACHUSETTSnative, an educator, and an evangelist.
Moody became a successful businessman in
Chicago before traveling as an evangelist through-
out America and England during the 1870s. The
Chicago Bible school that he founded in 1889 was
known first as the Bible Institute for Home and
Foreign Missions. It was the third educational in-
stitute that Moody had established; in 1879 he es-
tablished the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies
and in 1881, the Mt. Hermon School for Boys,
both in western Massachusetts.
One of the school’s best-known graduates
was MARYMCLEODBETHUNE. The enterprising
educator, feminist, and civic leader received aMoody Bible Institute 349