"Ida B. Wells"
It's a common misconception that actions speak louder than words. The press, a powerful medium of communication, persuades and impacts people as efficiently or more than actions. After reading Ida B. Wells " Southern Horrors and Other Writings," one sees the effect that her words had on shaping our country during the pivotal time of reconstruction. Wells came into the world as a slave on July 16, 1862, in Hole Springs, Mississippi and left as an inspiration to equality. Slavery no longer existed within the south. African Americans were supposed to be equal citizens, but they faced one of the cruelest practices any race has ever faced. Lynching and mob violence came into practice by white southerners after slavery had ended. "The lynching of slaves was rare, first and foremost because it would result in a loss of "property" and profit. Obviously it is more profitable to sell salved than to kill them (Wells p.10)." With this attitude not instilled in white southerners' times were scary for African Americans. When three of Well's friends were lynched she had seen enough. She picked up her pen and began to show the world the true southern horrors that she and her people faced everyday.
There is no justification for what the white southerners did to African Americans, but they tried to make a case of their criminal actions. The main justification for mob violence and lynching was to protect white women's virtue. If they had any suspicion to believe that an African American was even with a white woman they wouldn't hesitate to lynch them or carry out violent mob action against them. The white press in the "Evening Scimitar," a paper in Memphis, gives this excuse for the lynch law. "Aside from the violation of white women by negroes, which is the outcropping of a bestial perversion of instinct, the chief cause of trouble between the races in the South is the Negro's lack of manners (Wells p.63)." Wells did not accept those kinds of excuses and wanted the world to see what was really going on in the South. She knew the southerners were using their women as an excuse to murder and intimidate a race. "Lynching was not simply a spontaneous punishment for crimes but an act of terror perpetrated against a race of people in order to maintain power and control.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett dedicated her life to social justice and equality. She devoted her tremendous energies to building the foundations of African-American progress in business, politics, and law. Wells-Barnett was a key participant in the formation of the National Association of Colored Women as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She spoke eloquently in support of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The legacies of these organizations have been tremendous and her contribution to each was timely and indespensible. But no cause challenged the courage and integrity of Ida B. Wells-Barnett as much as her battle against mob violence and the terror of lynching at the end of the 19th century.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett is an investigative journalist who wrote in honesty and bluntness about the tragedies and continued struggles of the Negro man. She was still very much involved with the issue even after being granted freedom and the right to vote. Statistics have shown that death and disparity continued to befall the Negro people in the South where the white man was “educated so long in that school of practice” (Pg. 677 Par. 2). Yet in all the countless murders of Negroes by the white man only three had been convicted. The white man of the South, although opposed to the freedom of Negroes would eventually have to face the fact of the changing times. However, they took every opportunity and excuse to justify their continued horrors. There were three main excuses that the white man of the South came up w...
Ida B. Wells was a woman who devoted her life to social justice and equality for both African Americans and women. She was a woman of unique character. Her courage was what caused her to stand out amongst the majority of black women during her time who were subject to both racial and gender oppression. Wells was amongst the first of many to dedicate her life to the fight against injustice and the push for African American progression.
Ida B. Wells was a woman dedicated to a cause, a cause to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from being murdered by lynching. Lynching is defined as to take the law into its own hands and kill someone in punishment for a crime or a presumed crime. Ida B. Wells’ back round made her a logical spokesperson against lynching. She drew on many experiences throughout her life to aid in her crusade. Her position as a black woman, however, affected her credibility both in and out of America in a few different ways.
I feel that the white people felt that the blacks were getting to close to be like an equal. With that on mind, the whites felt that they need to show the blacks that they still run things. For instance, on page 107, it clearly states, "There are friends of humanity who feel their souls shrink from any compromise with murder, but whose deep and abiding reverence for womanhood causes them to hesitate in giving their support to this crusade against Lynch Law, out of fear that they may encourage the miscreants whose deeds are worse than murder." It goes on to explain blacks were lynched because the whites had the power to kill and get away with it and they prefer to kill, than taking it to court.
Ida Bell Wells, more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was born in Holly Springs Mississippi on the 16th of July in 1862. Ida was raised by her mother Lizzie Wells and her father James Wells. She was born into slavery as the oldest of eight children in the family. Both Ida’s parents were enslaved during the Civil War but after the war they became active in the Republican Party during the Reconstruction era. Ida’s father, James, was also involved in the Freedman’s Aid Society (www.biography.com). He also helped to start Shaw University. Shaw University was a university for the newly freed slaves to attend, it was also where Ida received the majority of her schooling. However, Ida received little schooling because she was forced to take care of her other siblings after her parents and one of her siblings passed away due to Yellow Fever. Ida became a teacher at the age of 16 as a way to make money for her and her siblings. Eventually Ida and all her sisters moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with their aunt, leaving all their brothers behind to continue working. In Memphis Ida began to stand up for the rights of African Americans and women.
Do to the Whites belief that they were superior to the African-American it is only natural that their treatment of the African-Americans matched their distaste of them. Even though the KKK’s oath...
One of the things that was the most prominent after the Reconstruction and that takes a major role in “They Say”, was the lynching of African Americans. In “They Say”, Ida B. Wells must rush back home to Memphis, because of a riot, in which deputies were shot by negroes (Davidson, 124). After the shooting of these deputies, the negro men were put in jail, and later taken out by people, which then lynched them (Davidson, 125). Lynching of negroes was becoming so common, that people expected to see them in newspapers even if they took place in small towns (Davidson, 114). Blacks would be hanged and tortured for petty reasons that caused no one any real harm. Ida B. Wells did some research on lynching and found that many, were supposedly because of rapes to white women. However, Wells discovered that there were no rapes, rather the relationships were consensual, and it was just white men that tried to maintain the “purity” of their white women (Davidson, 155). Wells was an activist against lynching and she tried to show her views on her newspaper. She first realized that government did not take care of them and urged her fellow African Americans to leave town and try to settle in another place (Davidson, 150). She later wrote a speech against lynching and said that relationships between black men and white women were consensual not rape (Davidson, 156). Whites were outraged and even threaten to kill her. Although Wells’s accusation were true, she was not able to make any drastic
...he newly freed black males and females, they could be lynched for just about anything, for example, a newly freed slave could be lynched for being unpopular in the community, for refusing to work when asked, for causing harm to livestock, which was considered more valuable. If they were accused of any crime major or minor they could be lynched without representation, this was not just a southern problem, but a national problem. The NAACP got involved publicly by the lynching of Jesse Washington of Waco, Texas.
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
The history of The Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States is a fascinating account of a group of human beings, forcibly taken from their homeland, brought to a strange new continent, and forced to endure countless inhuman atrocities. Forced into a life of involuntary servitude to white slave owners, African Americans were to face an uphill battle for many years to come. Who would face that battle? To say the fight for black civil rights "was a grassroots movement of ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary things" would be an understatement. Countless people made it their life's work to see the progression of civil rights in America. People like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, A Phillip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others contributed to the fight although it would take ordinary people as well to lead the way in the fight for civil rights. This paper will focus on two people whose intelligence and bravery influenced future generations of civil rights organizers and crusaders. Ida B.Wells and Mary Mcleod Bethune were two African American women whose tenacity and influence would define the term "ordinary to extraordinary".
Part of the aftermath of lynching in the South was the psychological consequences on the rabbles involved. The entire culture of African Americans is marked by lynching because the root reason of why white mobs lynched Southern African Americans was skin pigmentation. This means the blacks were lynched based on ignorant intolerance; however, the supposed basis for the white southerners’ hatred is internalized by every black person in their skin color. In the words of Lee H. Butler, Jr., “Unlike a single traumatic event that has been experienced by one person, lynching is a trauma that has marked an entire culture and several generations because it spanned more than eight decades.”
In 1860-1960 there was lynching in the United States. When the confederates (south) lost the civil war the slaves got freedom and got rights of human beings. This was just to say because segregation wasn 't over in the South and didn 't go away for over 100 years. Any black person in the South accused but not convicted of any crime of looking at a white woman, whistling at a white woman, touching a white woman, talking back to a white person, refusing to step into the gutter when a white person passed on the sidewalk, or in some way upsetting the local people was liable to be dragged from their house or jail cell by lots of people crowds, mutilated in a terrible
Emancipated blacks, after the Civil War, continued to live in fear of lynching, a practice of vigilantism that was often based on false accusations. Lynching was not only a way for southern white men to exert racist “justice,” it was also a means of keeping women, white and black, under the control of a violent white male ideology. In response to the injustices of lynching, the anti-lynching movement was established—a campaign in which women played a key role. Ida B. Wells, a black teacher and journalist was at the forefront and early development of this movement. In 1892 Wells was one of the first news reporters to bring the truths of lynching to proper media attention. Her first articles appeared in The Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper that she co-edited. She urged the black townspeople of Memphis to move west and to resist the coercive violence of lynching. [1] Her early articles were collected in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a widely distributed pamphlet that exposed the innocence of many victims of lynching and attacked the leaders of white southern communities for allowing such atrocities. [2] In 1895 Wells published a larger investigative report, A Red Record, which exposed how false or contrived accusations of rape accompanied less than one third of the cases documented around 1892. [3] The statistics and literature of A Red Record denounced the dominant white male ideology behind lynching – the thought that white womanhood was in need of protection against black men. Wells challenged this notion as a concealed racist agenda that functioned to keep white men in power over blacks as well as white women. Jacqueline Jones Royster documents the...