And Yet They Paused is a dramatic, one-act play presented in four scenes, by Georgia Douglas Johnson.
The play follows a church congregation in Mississippi waiting to hear if Congress is passing an anti-lynching bill.
Members of the group tell the Reverend about Joe Daniels, a young African American man that was beaten and thrown out of town for bootlegging, who has been blamed for killing a white store keeper the night before.
Johnson was the first playwright to develop a class of play specifically examining the injustice of lynching and how it effects families and communities.
[3] In 1938, the NAACP asked Johnson to write a short play on the difficulties of passing a federal anti-lynching bill to be used in a demonstration.