Lynching and Women: Ida B. Wells
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...
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...english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm>.
[3] Tabulating the statistics for lynchings in 1893, [in A Red Record] Wells
demonstrated that less than a third of the victims were even accused of rape or
attempted rape.
<http://www.alexanderstreet6.com/wasm/wasmrestricted/aswpl/doc4.htm>
[4] Royster. Southern Horrors and Other Writings (30).
[5] Brown states, “Southern white men [had a compelling urge] to avenge even a hint of
impropriety that encroached on their ownership of white women’s virtue” (21).
[6] From Royster’s explanation of white men’s justification for lynching (32).
[7] Women in History. <http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/barn-ida.htm>
[8] From George Washington University’s webpage on Anna Julia Cooper, under the “Social
Activism” section. <http://www.gwu.edu/~e73afram/be-nk-gbe.html>
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Show More‘Fire in a canebrake’ is quite a scorcher by Laura Wexler and which focuses on the last mass lynching which occurred in the American Deep South, the one in the heartland of rural Georgia, precisely Walton County, Georgia on 25th July, 1946, less than a year after the Second World War. Wexler narrates the story of the four black sharecroppers who met their end ‘at the hand of person’s unknown’ when an undisclosed number of white men simply shot the blacks to death. The author concentrates on the way the evidence was collected in those eerie post war times and how the FBI was actually involved in the case, but how nothing came of their extensive investigations.
Wexler, Laura. 2003. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. Scribner; 2004. Print
The incident, now known as The Lynching at the Curve, was the spark which shifted her career into investigative journalism. She went on to investigate the cause of lynchings throughout the country, despite the great risk it made to her life. In that same year, she published a pamphlet titled, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In 1894, she published a more detailed continuation of her studies in a pamphlet titled, A Red Record, 1892–1894. Both pamphlets were key in disproving the major accepted and given reasons for lynching, which were that black men were raping white women. Wells found that the majority of the relationships were consensual and unveiled a system of sexualized racism in the South (Schechter). In reaction to her anti-lynching writings, several threats were made to her life if she was to ever return to Memphis. Shortly after, her newspaper office in Memphis was destroyed (Jim Crow Stories, PBS).
Barnett, Ida B., and Ida B. Barnett. Southern horrors and other writings: the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1997.
In arguing against cloning, the central debate is derived from the fact that this unnatural process is simply unethical. The alleged
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
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors. Lynch Law in All Its Phase. New York: New York Age Print, 1892. Print. 6.
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