Lynching and Women: Ida B. Wells Essay -- History Historical Essays

kill and Wo workforce Ida B. swellEmancipated blacks, after the Civil War, continued to live in terror of lynching, a practice of vigilantism that was often based on false accusations. Lynching was not only a way for grey bloodless men to exert racist justice, it was also a means of keeping women, white and black, under the control of a violent white male ideology. In response to the injustices of lynching, the anti-lynching movement was establisheda campaign in which women play a key role. Ida B. Wells, a black teacher and journalist was at the forefront and early development of this movement. In 1892 Wells was one of the graduation news reporters to bring the truths of lynching to proper media attention. Her first articles appeared in The cede Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper that she co-edited. She urged the black townspeople of Memphis to move western United States and to resist the coercive violence of lynching. 1 Her early articles were collected in g rey Horrors Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a widely distributed folder that exposed the innocence of many victims of lynching and attacked the leaders of white southern communities for allowing such atrocities. 2 In 1895 Wells published a larger inquiring report, A Red Record, which exposed how false or contrived accusations of infraction accompanied less than one tertiary of the cases documented around 1892. 3 The statistics and lit of A Red Record denounced the dominant white male ideology behind lynching the thought that white womanhood was in inquire of protection against black men. Wells challenged this notion as a out of sight racist agenda that functioned to keep white men in mogul over blacks as well as white women. Jacqueline Jones Royster documents the... ...english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm.3 Tabulating the statistics for lynchings in 1893, in A Red Record Wells demonstrated that less than a third of the victims were even accused of ra pe or attempted rape. 4 Royster. Southern Horrors and other Writings (30).5 Brown states, Southern white men had a have urge to avenge even a hint of impropriety that encroached on their self-command of white womens virtue (21).6 From Roysters explanation of white mens justification for lynching (32). 7 Women in History. 8 From George Washington Universitys webpage on Anna Julia Cooper, under the Social Activism section.