IDA B. WELLS

In the 1890s, African American journalist Ida B. Wells waged a lonely campaign against the extrajudicial murder of blacks. Wells was forced to flee Memphis after she publicly denounced the lynching of three friends. Their crime? They had dared to open a grocery store that drew customers from a white competitor. Most Americans believed interracial rape led to lynching. In a series of devastating pamphlets, Wells destroyed that myth. As in this passage from Southern Horrors (1892), Wells conducted careful research and often quoted from white southern newspapers to make her case. Wells later helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

There are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. …

A few instances to substantiate the assertion that some white women love the company of the Afro-American will not be out of place. … Sarah Clark of Memphis loved a black man and lived openly with him. When she was indicted last spring for miscegenation, she swore in court that she was not a white woman. This she did to escape the penitentiary. … A young girl living on Poplar Street, who was discovered in intimate relations with a handsome mulatto young colored man, Will Morgan by name, stole her father’s money to send the young fellow away from that father’s wrath. She has since joined him in Chicago. …

There is hardly a town in the South which has not an instance of the kind which is well-known. … Hence there is a growing demand among Afro-Americans that the guilt or innocence of parties accused of rape be fully established. …

When the victim is a colored woman it is different. Last winter in Baltimore, Md., three white ruffians assaulted a Miss Camphor, a young Afro-American girl, while out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was an Afro-American. The case went to the courts, an Afro-American lawyer defended the men, and they were acquitted. …

Only one-third of the 728 victims to mobs have been charged with rape, to say nothing of those of that one-third who were innocent of the charge. … This cry [of rape] has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit. … Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too often taken the white man’s word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved.

SOURCE : Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 53–56, 58, 61.