Ida B. Wells and Her Campaign to Stop Lynching

Ida B. Wells fearlessly crusaded to stop lynching in the South by researching and reporting lynchings in detail and by comparing coverage from black and white sources.

DOCUMENT 1

Ida B. Wells, Editorial Protesting the Lynching of Friends in Memphis, 1892

The lynching in 1892 of three friends who ran a grocery store outside of Memphis touched Wells deeply. She wrote an outraged editorial in the Free Press. Later she would repeat the details in her first pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892).

On March 9, 1892, there were lynched in this same city three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic business men. . . . They owned a flourishing grocery business in a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man named Barrett had one on the opposite corner. After a personal difficulty which Barrett sought by going into the “People’s Grocery” drawing a pistol and was thrashed by Calvin McDowell, he (Barrett) threatened to “clean them out.” These men were a mile beyond the city limits and the police protection; hearing that Barrett’s crowd was coming to attack them Saturday night, they mustered forces and prepared to defend themselves against the attack.

When Barrett came he led a posse of officers, twelve in number, who afterward claimed to be hunting a man for whom they had a warrant. That twelve men in citizen’s clothes should think it necessary to go in the night to hunt one man who had never before been arrested, or made any record as a criminal has never been explained. When they entered the back door the young men thought the threatened attack was on, and fired into them. Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending party found it was officers of the law upon whom they had fired, they ceased and got away.

Thirty-one men were arrested and thrown in jail as “conspirators,” although they all declared more than once they did not know they were firing on officers. Excitement was at fever heat until the morning papers, two days after, announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out of danger. This hindered rather than helped the plans of the whites. There was no law on the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the “unwritten law” did. Three of these men, the president, the manager and the clerk of the grocery—“the leaders of the conspiracy”—were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly brutal manner. “The Negroes are getting too independent,” they say, “we must teach them a lesson.”

What lesson? The lesson of subordination. “Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares to shoot a white man, even in self-defense.”

Source: Southern Horrors and Other Writings, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 64–65.

DOCUMENT 2

Ida B. Wells, On Lack of Justice and Due Process for Accused Blacks, 1894

In her 1894 pamphlet The Red Record, Wells insisted that lynching assumed all black men were guilty, thus denying them the constitutional right to defend themselves in front of a judge and jury.

In lynching, opportunity is not given the Negro to defend himself against the unsupported accusations of white men and women. The word of the accuser is held to be true and the excited blood-thirsty mob demands that the rule of law be reserved and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the victim of their hate and revenge must prove himself innocent. No evidence he can offer will satisfy the mob; he is bound hand and foot and swung into eternity. Then to excuse its infamy, the mob almost invariably reports the monstrous falsehood that its victim made a full confession before he was hanged.

Source: Royster, Southern Horrors, 153.

DOCUMENT 3

Ida B. Wells, On Mob Rule in New Orleans, 1900

In her last pamphlet, Mob Rule in New Orleans, Wells describes the riot that occurred when a black man, Robert Charles, attacked by a police officer with a billy club, retaliated. This led to a duel that then brought on further violence.

During the entire time the mob held the city in its hands and went about holding up street cars and searching them, taking from them colored men to assault, shoot and kill, chasing colored men upon the public square, through alleys and into houses of anybody who would take them in, breaking into the homes of defenseless colored men and women and beating aged and decrepit men and women to death, the police and the legally-constituted authorities showed plainly where their sympathies were, for in no case reported through the daily papers does there appear the arrest, trial and conviction of one of the mob for any of the brutalities which occurred. The ringleaders of the mob were at no time disguised. Men were chased, beaten and killed by white brutes, who boasted of their crimes, and the murderers still walk the streets of New Orleans, well known and absolutely exempt from prosecution. Not only were they exempt from prosecution by the police while the town was in the hands of the mob, but even now that law and order is supposed to resume control, these men, well known, are not now, nor ever will be, called to account for the unspeakable brutalities of that terrible week. On the other hand, the colored men who were beaten by the police and dragged into the station for purposes of intimidation were quickly called before the courts and fined or sent to jail upon the statement of the police.

Source: Royster, Southern Horrors, 181–82.

Questions for Analysis

ANALYZE THE EVIDENCE: In her campaign to end lynching, how does Wells seek to generate sympathy for the victims and to build an outraged antilynching coalition that will end the practice?

RECOGNIZE VIEWPOINTS: How did the white people involved in lynching defend their actions?

CONSIDER THE CONTEXT: In addition to lynching, what else did white southerners do to keep African Americans in subordinate positions?