26 OCTOBER 1892
Ida B Wells publishes her research into lynching
The horrors of racist murders are revealed
Extrajudicial killings, predominantly of black men by white mobs, were a horrific scourge of the US South in the 19th century. Such episodes were widely decried in the north – but still they continued.
One woman was determined to publicise and end these racist murders. Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, Ida B Wells became a pioneering journalist and civil rights leader. Investigating the appalling litany of lynching cases, she noticed that many were ‘revenge crimes' perpetrated after the alleged rapes of white women. She also saw that many such claims were false, used by white southerners to justify violence against black men. The real reasons for such attacks ranged
