ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that black engagement with animal politics—in particular, with the animal welfare movement —was instrumental in the African American campaign against lynching, where the ideology of animal welfare actually becomes one of the central means by which arguments for racial justice are waged. Black anti-lynching activism itself provides a plethora of testimony to the dangers of being animalized—of being treated as animals are treated—and it is, of course, undeniably true that blacks have historically suffered enormously through racist and speciesist associations of blackness and animality. A return to abolitionist activism allows us to chart the development of animal welfare and its emerging adoption by and efficacy in the anti-lynching movement. Beginning with the seventeenth issue of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, a masthead crowned the front page of every issue of the abolitionist newspaper. The Liberator illustrates its hopes for and promises of a freedom that can come when the slave's bonds are cut loose from the animal's.
