Ida B. Wells

Works

• 1892Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

  The pamphlet that answered the destruction of her newspaper: lynching is not punishment for crime but terror against Black citizens.

• 1895A Red Record

  Lynching statistics for 1892–94, compiled largely from white newspapers: most victims were not even accused of rape.

Position

Wells treated lynching as a social fact to be counted, not as a series of outrages to be deplored. In Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895) she compiled cases largely from the white press, including the Chicago Tribune’s annual lists, so that no one could dismiss her figures as partisan. They showed that in most lynchings rape was not even alleged; victims were killed for economic competition, for disputes, for “insolence”, or for nothing. She concluded that lynching served to keep Black people economically and politically subordinate after Reconstruction, and that the myth of the Black rapist protected white men’s own sexual violence against Black women and denied that white women could freely choose Black partners. She called on Black citizens to boycott, to leave lynching towns and, if necessary, to defend themselves: “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home”. Her campaigns brought her into conflict with Frances Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and, at times, with more cautious Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Du Bois. In the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington she refused to march in a segregated section and joined the Illinois delegation. Historians and sociologists now discuss her as an early practitioner of empirical social research and of a Black feminist analysis of race, sex and violence, which Angela Davis and Patricia Hill Collins later took up.

Life & context

Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. When her parents and a younger brother died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, the sixteen-year-old kept the family together by teaching. She moved to Memphis, and in 1883, refusing to leave the first-class ladies’ car of a train, was dragged out; she sued the railway and won in a local court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the verdict in 1887. Writing under the name “Iola”, she became co-owner of the Memphis newspaper Free Speech and Headlight. In 1892 a white mob lynched three Black grocers, among them her friend Thomas Moss. When she wrote that the charge of rape against Black men was a pretext, a mob destroyed her press while she was in New York, and she could not return. She lectured in Britain in 1893 and 1894, married the Chicago lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895, and in Chicago founded the Negro Fellowship League and the Alpha Suffrage Club (1913). She signed the call that led to the NAACP in 1909 but was kept at its margins. She died in Chicago in 1931; her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, appeared in 1970, and in 2020 she received a special Pulitzer citation.

Further main works

• The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (with Frederick Douglass and others, 1893)
• Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900)
• Crusade for Justice (autobiography, posthumous, 1970)

Appears in

• Journey ‘How Society Became Thinkable’ · Stop 8 of 12