18. Railroads, Business, and Politics in the Gilded Age, 1865

Quiz for Analyzing Historical Evidence: Ida B. Wells and Her Campaign to Stop Lynching

Select the best answer for each question. Click the “submit” button for each question to turn in your work.

Question 18.11

1. Which of the following is a technique Ida B. Wells used try to raise public awareness about lynching in the South in the 1890s?

Giving impassioned speeches in front of large audiences at churches across the South

Writing a series of articles in the New York Tribune to spread awareness to Northerners

Starting a letter writing campaign, in which black Southerners wrote letters to the president

Publishing comparisons of how lynching was reported in black sources versus white sources

Question 18.12

2. The fact that Ida B. Wells’s three lynched friends owned a successful grocery business illustrates how white violence in the late nineteenth century often targeted black Southerners who

voted for the Republican party.

talked casually with white women.

experienced financial success.

bought homes in the suburbs.

Question 18.13

3. When, in Ida B. Wells’s reporting, white men in the 1890s said that they had to lynch black men to teach them a lesson, for what reason did they claim such a lesson was deserved?

Black Southerners were not acting subordinate to whites.

Too many black Southerners were graduating from high school.

Black women were refusing the advances of white men.

Black men were running for local political office.

Question 18.14

4. Which constitutional right did Ida B. Wells argue was being denied to black men who were victims of lynching at the turn of the twentieth century?

The right to freedom of speech

The right to bear arms

The right to freedom of religion

The right to trial by jury

Question 18.15

5. As Ida B. Wells argued in her reporting, how were black and white men treated differently by courts and the police in the South at the turn of the twentieth century?

When a black man and a white man committed the same crime in the South, judges typically gave the black man a much longer jail sentence than the white man.

While many white men who murdered black men were never arrested, black men were frequently fined or jailed even if they had not committed any crimes.

Most southern states passed laws after Reconstruction that forbade black men from serving on juries, so black criminals were tried in front of all-white juries.