Ida B. Wells

Documenting Violence: Ida B. Wells and the Crusade Against Lynching, 1892-1900
History Skill: Interpreting Documents; Media Type: Document

In 1892, Ida B. Wells, a black journalist in Memphis, Tennessee, launched a crusade against lynching. That year, a total of 230 people were lynched in the United States, the vast majority of them black men in the South. After the Civil War, white Americans turned to lynching-- extra-judicial hangings by violent mobs for unproven or invented offenses-- to re-assert dominance over African Americans. From 1882 to 1901, there was an average of more than one hundred lynchings per year across the country. Wells lost three of her friends to lynching, and she was determined to alert the world to the crimes being committed. She began her campaign with three impassioned articles about the executions of her friends. She then published a pamphlet, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” and a book, A Red Record, that explored the ideological, economic, and political sources of lynching in the South. Wells’s work would eventually galvanize an international movement calling for federal intervention to end the violence. This module will introduce you to Wells and her work, as well as providing statistics on the frequency of lynchings in turn-of-the-century America. What factors contributed to the increase in lynchings between 1870 and the 1920s? Why was it so difficult to suppress?

Source

Excerpts from Ida B. Wells's A Red Record (1895), including statistics on southern lynching at the end of the nineteenth century.

Quiz

1. Ida B. Wells wrote about the lynchings of __________.

a. recent immigrants, especially Jews, along the eastern seaboard
b. African Americans in the North and West
c. African Americans in the South
d. women, both white and black, because they needed special protections

2. Ida B. Wells was __________.

a. an early investigative journalist who used supporting evidence to document her case
b. one of the first women lawyers, who gathered statistics for her legal cases and political crusade
c. a northern reformer whose eyes were opened to the horrors of lynching during a southern tour
d. the pseudonym for Timothy Thomas Fortune, editor of the African American New York Age

3. Ida B. Wells found that the majority of African Americans who were lynched in the South were accused of __________.

a. the rape of white women
b. transgressions such as quarrelling with whites and making threats, race prejudice, and incendiarism
c. the murders of white women or men
d. illegal political or economic activities

4. Critics of lynching were silenced by __________.

a. the taboo of discussing sexual relations, including the possibility that white women voluntarily entered into relationships with black men
b. the fear that they would be legally exiled from the South
c. a lack of evidence about the reality of lynching
d. the overwhelming evidence demonstrating the guilt of those lynched for the crimes for which they were convicted

5. To raise international awareness about lynchings, Wells made two speaking tours to __________ in 1893 and 1894.

a. Scotland, Wales, and England
b. France and Germany
c. Brazil, Argentina, and Chile
d. China and Japan

6. Wells was a founder of the interracial __________ in 1909.

a. Anti-Ku Klux Klan Association
b. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
c. Citizen's Council
d. League of Nations

7. In writing about lynching, Wells encouraged African Americans to migrate from the __________ to the __________.

a. East, West
b. South, North
c. South, West
d. South, African continent

Short Answer

1. Wells was involved in numerous social changes and movements during her career. What other forms of social justice did Wells crusade for?

2. In A Red Record, Wells refers to three primary reasons given by white people to "explain" the practice of lynching. Explain why these rationales satisfied most white southerners.

3. Describe some of the ways in which Ida B. Wells's career can be seen as a result of and a response to political, economic, and social changes for African Americans between 1865 and 1895, when A Red Record was published.

Project

1. Ida B. Wells published her first important editorial on the lynching of her three friends, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Wil Stewart, just weeks after they were lynched in Memphis in 1892. At the time of the lynchings, Wells was traveling to the annual meeting of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia and to New York City to meet with T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of the African American newspaper New York Age. From Fortune she learned that her newspaper offices in Memphis had been destroyed and that some white men in Memphis had declared that she would be killed if she returned. Keeping a daily diary was common in the late nineteenth century, and Wells kept one. It was a place for her to work on her writing, record her observations, and document her activities. It was also a way to reflect on her personal feelings. Write a diary entry that describes Wells's feelings of outrage after learning of the lynching of her friends in 1892. What is the tone of an emotional or personal response to lynching? How does this compare to the ideological and structural analysis Wells uses in A Red Record?

2. A Red Record is subtitled "Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892, 1893, 1894." Wells presents her evidence in categories based on the accusations against the individuals who were lynched and provides totals for lynchings by state. The evidence for 1893 was compiled by Wells from reports in the Chicago Tribune. Using the statistics for 1893, rearrange the evidence by state. Record the types of accusations within each state. For example, there were twenty-five lynchings in Alabama. How many of these were for arson, suspected robbery, assault? Does this new arrangement change your observations of lynching patterns? How? Why?

3. Listen to a recording of Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" and discuss in an essay the African American memory of lynching. In his work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that modern nation-states oscillate between remembering and forgetting and that this is necessary for their survival. What purpose does remembering, or forgetting, have for different communities and cultures as well as for the nation? The cultural remembrance of lynching can be compared to other national and international tragedies of violence including the Holocaust. How is lynching remembered through cultural forms such as song, film, photographs? What does it mean to remember racial violence through representation and metaphors?

Teaching

Resource

Bedford sources: Jacqueline Jones Royster edits and presents Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, a collection of Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching writings.

Print sources: W. Fitzhugh Brundage's Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (1993) is based on analysis of nearly six hundred cases and examines closely African American reactions to lynching. C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2nd ed., 1968) detail southern politics after Reconstruction. In Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (1963) August Meier analyzes African American protest and accommodation. Regarding the life of Ida B. Wells, see The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1991), Richard M. Haynes's Ida B. Wells: Anti-Lynching Crusader (1993), and Suzanne Freedman's Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Anti-Lynching Crusade (1995). On African American women at the end of the nineteenth century, see Darlene Clark Hine, ed., 'We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible': A Reader in Black Women's History (1995) and Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1994). In Civilities and Civil Rights (1981), William H. Chafe examines historic segregation patterns in North Carolina.

Internet sources: For two pamphlets by Wells, "To the members of the Anti-Lynching Bureau" (1902) and "Lynch Law in Georgia" (1899) see "African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907" at the Library of Congress <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaphome.html>. The Schomburg Research Collection for images of African American women is available at: <http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/images_aa19/>. For an excerpt from Alfreda Duster's "Crusade for Justice," pp. 375-382, see <http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/equalrights.html>. Internet Resources for Students of Afro-American History and Culture can be accessed at: <http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rulib/socsci/hist/afrores.htm#19>.