America Awakened: The Anti-Lynching Crusade of Ida B. Wells-Barnett

By Ida B. Wells-Barnett

A classic of investigative journalism, the pamphlets of Ida B. Wells-Barnett shine a light on the evils of racism in the United States. With a contextual introduction and useful footnotes, this book gives students an opportunity to analyze and interpret primary texts. The book includes the full text of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases; The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States; and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, and Other Lynching Statistics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chemeketa Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781943536771

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Born a slave, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) became one of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most powerful voices for justice and against the brutality of lynching. Her unflinching journalistic accounts shed light on the evils and persistence of racism in the United States. Wells-Barnett was one of the original founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her groundbreaking activism laid the foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 2020, she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her “outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”

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Editor’s Introduction

Lynch Law has become so common in the United States that the finding of the dead body of a Negro, suspended between heaven and earth to the limb of a tree, is of so slight importance that neither the civil authorities nor press agencies consider the matter worth investigating.

—from The Red Record (1895) by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ida B. Wells-Barnett embarked on a crusade to reveal the stark reality of racial injustice in the United States. Her activism, radicalism, and willingness to confront racism during a time when women were restricted from public life and African Americans were viewed as inferior set her apart from more commonly known activists such as Rosa Parks. The legacy of activism and social justice of Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching crusade laid the foundation for the mass civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1892, Wells-Barnett published her first pamphlet investigating lynching entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases and published two more pamphlets on the subject: The Red Record (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). These pamphlets were first published in the period that became known as the nadir of race relations (1890–1920), referring to the darkest days (or lowest point) of racism, anti-Black violence, and hostility following the American Civil War.

In these three journalistic pamphlets, Wells-Barnett provides details, data, and analysis of the causes of lynching in America. She presents graphic descriptions from editorials and firsthand accounts of extralegal (outside the law) violence including riots, mutilations, shootings, hangings, and burnings. What’s more, Wells-Barnett dissects the justifications for lynching including accusations of rape. With this scrutiny, she steps out of the traditional role of the Black female by discussing the reality of consensual sex between a Black male and white female. Wells-Barnett’s lifelong campaign against lynching exposed the fallacy of rape as the justification for lynching and revolutionized the way Americans talk about violence against African Americans. Together, these three pamphlets show the destructive and brutal nature of white racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Wells-Barnett was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. Like all slaves, Wells-Barnett was considered property. Many Southern states made it illegal to educate a slave because an educated slave was unrulier, more recalcitrant, and ambitious. Most importantly, her fate, including whom she married, where she lived, how she cared for her children, and what type of labor she performed, could be determined by her owner. Nonetheless, the year of her birth was pivotal in the American Civil War and African American progress. In the winter of 1862, Ulysses S. Grant emerged as the commanding general for the Union Army of the North, and by the summer of 1862 he led federal troops to turn the tide against the Southern Confederacy. Moreover, in September of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that took effect January 1, 1863, which freed some slaves (those in the Confederacy) and led to the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery throughout the United States in 1865.

By the time of Wells-Barnett’s eighth birthday in 1870, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments made Blacks citizens and provided them voting rights and protections. To be sure, emancipation opened a world of unprecedented opportunity for Southern Blacks, but the violence and structures of racism were ever-present. By the late 1870s, Blacks lived in a society where racism was legal and included segregated train cars, theaters, bathrooms, and other public places of accommodation. It was routine for white men to demean and beat Blacks in public for violating written and unwritten social codes, such as talking back. Furthermore, an all-white jury was common in legal proceedings, and Blacks were limited in their testimony against white offenders.

In spite of these ongoing struggles for equality, one of the biggest opportunities that Wells-Barnett gained after emancipation was access to education. At the conclusion of the American Civil War, the federal government immediately implemented plans to reintegrate Southern states back into the Union and reconstruct the shattered South. Reconstruction (1865–1877) brought Southern states back into the Union, provided legal rights for Blacks, and attempted to rebuild industry and infrastructure. White Northerners, including reform-minded religious groups such as the Quakers and former abolitionists, journeyed to the South to educate recently freed slaves. Unlike the opportunistic Northern carpetbaggers who descended on the South to profit from Reconstruction, these groups did not venture south to exploit and seek riches. White Northerners and Southern Blacks faced hostile conditions during Reconstruction. In spite of the dangerous conditions, and with the help of community leaders and churches, many schools were constructed in the region with the intent to uplift Blacks out of poverty. Wells-Barnett attended one such school, Rust College, founded in Holly Springs in 1866. Wells-Barnett and members of her community had to navigate a violent backlash of white supremacy including tarring and feathering (a form of public humiliation and torture involving pouring hot wood tar on someone’s skin and then coating it with feathers), political assassinations, and organized terrorism.

The most notorious terrorist group during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 and still exists today. Their name derives from the Greek word Kuklos (circle) and the English word clan, referring to a family or group of like-minded individuals. Members of the Klan are white supremacists who use violence and terror to enforce white power. The Reconstruction-era Klan lasted until the 1870s and its purpose was to impose white rule in the South by any means necessary. Thousands of men joined the KKK during Reconstruction, and it took federal legislation known as the Enforcement Acts to end the first manifestation of the Klan.

However, in 1915, the KKK was reborn. This second-era Klan opposed racial integration and promoted the inferiority of Blacks. The Klan promoted themselves as champions of traditional family values and white Protestantism and expanded their list of enemies to include immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and women’s rights advocates. The second-era KKK was a national movement with a membership that numbered in the millions until its demise in the 1930s. The third-era Klan arose during the civil rights era (1950–70s), and today the group remains active but decentralized. Dozens of groups use the name Klan with a total membership estimated between 5,000 to 8,000 people, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In 1877, Reconstruction ended when a compromise was reached in the disputed 1876 presidential election. The Compromise of 1877 allowed Rutherford B. Hayes to win the presidency in exchange for the removal of all federal troops from the South and the restoration of political control by the Democrats. Without federal protections, white supremacy became entrenched in the South. The Great Betrayal, another name for the Compromise, allowed Southern states to enact Jim Crow laws that forbid racial miscegenation (intermarriage), restricted Blacks from voting, legalized discrimination in hiring, and allowed segregation of public schools and facilities. Moreover, by the end of Reconstruction, unwritten racial codes were well established in the region. These unwritten codes meant that Blacks were expected to step off sidewalks to allow whites to pass and that a Black man could be punished for looking at a white woman in public.

A year after Reconstruction ended, Wells-Barnett’s parents died in a yellow fever outbreak leaving her to care for her siblings. To support herself and her siblings, Wells-Barnett took and passed the teachers’ exam and began teaching near Holly Springs. In 1884, Wells-Barnett took a teaching position in Memphis, Tennessee, about fifty miles away from Holly Springs, Mississippi. During one train ride to Memphis, a conductor told her that she needed to ride in the segregated smoking car. Wells-Barnett sued the railroad company and won a $500 judgement, but it was overturned in 1887 by the Supreme Court of Tennessee. The experience of challenging the racial status quo gave her a taste for social justice that she continued to pursue after settling in Memphis.

Wells-Barnett’s job as a writer for her church paper in 1887 led to her discovery of one of her passions in life: writing about the struggles of Blacks in America. In 1888, Wells-Barnett was offered part ownership in a local newspaper called the Memphis Free Speech. This position would launch Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching campaign. Wells-Barnett’s work with the newspaper, however, was controversial and dangerous. She often traveled to the scenes of racial violence to witness and record the events for the newspaper. In response to her scathing criticism of the poor conditions in segregated Black schools, the Memphis board of education fired Wells-Barnett as a teacher in 1891. As a result, Wells-Barnett dedicated her time to her work at the Free Speech.

In 1892, Wells-Barnett’s world was upended once again when a close friend and two other African American businessmen from Memphis were lynched. This extralegal racial violence compelled her to write a critique in her newspaper, denouncing the lack of legal protections for Blacks in Memphis. An editorial in the Free Speech urged Blacks in Memphis to save our money, and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.¹

Her critique resulted in death threats and the destruction of her paper. Wells-Barnett’s message threatened an important cog in the system of Southern white supremacy and prosperity: cheap Black labor. Since slavery, the value of African Americans was based on their role in the cash crop agricultural system, which allowed Southern elites to prosper. The message presented in the Free Speech directly threatened that prosperity. As a result, a group of white men in Memphis went to the office of the Free Speech, ran the business manager out of town, and destroyed the type of furnishings of the office.² What’s more, they left a note threatening the life of any person who attempted to publish the paper again.³ Indeed, the controversial and dangerous work Wells-Barnett accomplished at the Free Speech provided her with the tools to launch an international anti-lynching campaign. Later in 1892, she moved to New York to continue her crusade and became part owner of a Black newspaper, the New York Age.

In 1894, Wells-Barnett moved to Chicago, Illinois, and married Ferdinand Barnett, the founder of the Chicago Conservator, another Black newspaper. The couple had four children, in addition to her two other children from a previous marriage. She continued her fight against lynching in the hope that Congress would pass a national anti-lynching law. She also focused on other progressive issues such as racial and gender equality. In support of this work, Wells-Barnett became a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (1896), a Black woman’s club that arose in response to the racial tensions within the feminist movement.

Additionally, she was a founding member in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Wells-Barnett and her husband founded the Negro Fellowship League in Chicago in 1910. This organization helped newly arriving Black migrants from the South by providing financial help, housing, and job training. Like many prominent female activists, Wells-Barnett was a suffragette, and in 1913 she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, the city’s first African American suffrage organization. Wells-Barnett’s activism and leadership in the Black community broke down gender barriers, which is evident in her willingness to confront people and ideas that she did not support.

Without a doubt, her actions as a female African American activist were unconventional. In the 1920s and 1930s, Wells-Barnett continued to be engaged in politics and to push for national anti-lynching legislation. In 1930, Wells-Barnett ran an unsuccessful campaign for a seat on the Illinois state senate. On March 25, 1931, Ida B. Wells-Barnett died of kidney disease. Although her anti-lynching work never produced any legislation during her lifetime, her work on that crusade cemented her legacy as a prominent Black female activist.

Lynching

The need for Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching campaign was rooted in the racialized nature of lynching and extralegal violence in the wake of Reconstruction. Prior to the Civil War, the practice of lynching was widespread throughout America. Lynching, as defined by sociologist Oliver C. Cox, is the homicidal act at the hands of a mob with the intent of subjugating one group of people to a lower social status.⁴ Although lynching predates the Civil War, it became racialized by the 1870s. This shift is clearly related to the increase in Black political power during Reconstruction. As African Americans gained more rights and freedoms, white terrorism and violence increased, and lynching focused on keeping Blacks in a subordinate position. According to the NAACP, from 1882–1968, Blacks comprised 3,446 of the recorded victims of lynching while whites made up 1,297.⁵

The reasons for this shift are fixed in the racist stereotypes of African Americans that justified slavery and Jim Crow laws. Some common ideas about African Americans were that they were ignorant, that the system of slavery civilized them, that they were hypersexual, and that they were predisposed to commit crime. These prejudices were reinforced in the nineteenth century by men such as Herbert Spencer who promoted social Darwinism, which falsely suggested that racial groups were subject to the same laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Consequently, proponents of this theory believed that Africans, African societies, and their African American progeny were genetically inferior to white Europeans.

Elite Southern whites attempted to explain the social ills of poverty, poor education, and disease that flourished in Southern Black communities through a racial lens. For example, in 1884, The Atlantic published an article by Nathan S. Shaler entitled The Negro Problem. As a Southerner whose family owned slaves and proponent of scientific racism, Shaler suggests that slavery elevated the Black man out of the barbarism of Africa and provided a civilizing force to suppress their animal instincts.⁶ He writes that during puberty the Black man regresses at this stage of life [and] becomes less intellectual than he was before; the passions cloud and do not irradiate the mind.⁷ These pseudoscientific ideas were propagated to justify the subordination and social control of Blacks.

Sociologist Oliver Cox asserts that lynching was a logical outgrowth of dominant assumptions and prevalent thinking of a community.⁸ Pseudoscientific theories, such as scientific racism, were supported by contemporary popular culture to reinforce the dominant assumptions and prevalent thinking. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Blacks were stereotyped in magazines, advertisements, theater, and silent films. The term Jim Crow comes from a character in a nineteenth century minstrel show made famous by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man in blackface who performed songs and skits of Black life. His routines were rooted in prejudice and racial stereotypes of African Americans. Rice’s character was a buffoon who dressed in shabby clothing and spoke in exaggerated broken English vernacular. He performed song and dance routines that overstated Blacks’ ignorance, superstition, and clumsiness.

Muckraker and the Progressive Era

Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching crusade exemplifies the prominent role of muckraking, a form of investigative exposé journalism on the rise during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s). By the time she published her first anti-lynching pamphlet in 1892, Wells-Barnett had seen the United States undergo an era of local, regional, and national reform. Progressives attempted to reform child labor, American prisons, urban decay, the Negro Problem, politics, and other ills they felt were troubling the country. Investigative journalism was a means to bring attention to social ills, and Wells-Barnett forged a one-woman campaign to show the horrors of lynching.

To effectively expose lynching, Wells-Barnett published her works as pamphlets, short works that are unbound or bound with a paper cover. Pamphlets are cost effective, and their use to disseminate ideas and promote political change has a long history. Martin Luther—leader of the Protestant Reformation—published the Ninety-five Theses (a critique of the Catholic Church) as a pamphlet. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which presented arguments that supported American independence from Great Britain, was published as a pamphlet. Wells-Barnett used pamphlets because they made her message accessible to a broad range of people. The cost for Southern Horrors was fifteen cents in 1892, which is roughly equivalent to four dollars in 2020.

Like many women during the Progressive Era, Wells-Barnett challenged the traditional role of women in American society. Not only did she travel to dangerous regions of the South, she openly challenged the accusation of rape to justify lynching. According to historian Philip Dray in his 2002 work entitled At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, the most sensational and commonly repeated excuse for a lynching was the sexual assault by a Black man against a white woman.⁹ Wells-Barnett openly challenged this belief. She suggested that white women and Black men could engage in a consensual relationship, a radical idea at the time. This assertion led to death threats against Wells-Barnett because her stance defied the commonly held belief in the South that white women could not be attracted to Black men. Furthermore, Wells-Barnett was active in women’s clubs such as the YWCA and openly challenged the racial status quo. Wells-Barnett and many Progressives attempted to reconcile two competing impulses of progressive reformers: social justice and social control.

Wells-Barnett’s crusade was rooted in the progressive impulse of social justice, but it also confronted another impulse of social control. Like many Progressives, when she saw an injustice in society she attempted to expose it to the world. Social justice also inspired Progressives to promote reforms in child labor and prisons and led to the creation of the NAACP. Noted muckraker Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle described the struggles of immigrant families in the meat packing industry in Chicago to expose the injustice of the industry’s harsh working conditions. The Jungle was widely read, but it did not lead to any significant reform for the conditions of immigrant families. It did, however, lead to better meat inspection and cleanliness of food production.

The progressive impulse of social control conflicted with Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching crusade. Drawing from ideas of social Darwinism, many Progressives promoted the notion that so-called inferior groups needed to be controlled. Because they believed these groups lacked the ability to control themselves, reformers promoted policy and legislation for social control. Jim Crow laws are examples of such legislation. Reforms including the legalization of segregation, disenfranchisement, discrimination, anti-miscegenation laws, and the creation of prison chain gangs were enacted to control African Americans. Additionally, social control included extralegal methods such as lynching.

Wells-Barnett investigated and exposed the social ills of lynching during her anti-lynching campaign. She used graphic details and accounts of race riots, mutilations, hangings, and burnings of Black Americans to show the international community the hypocrisy of American liberalism and democracy. Her willingness to confront physical danger, challenge widely held racial stereotypes, and lead in a way that contradicted traditional gender roles are why the three pamphlets collected in this book are important. They are excellent examples of the nature and brutality of racial violence, the irrational fear of miscegenation, the contradictions between the progressive impulses of social justice and social control, and the determination and spirit of resistance of African Americans.

Graphic Content and Language

Finally, like primary sources in general, Southern Horrors, The Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans do contain inaccuracies and bias. Firsthand accounts and recollections of events sometimes omit details, and sometimes new details emerge years after the event or account was recorded. In spite of the potential inaccuracies and bias of primary sources, they are important investigative tools and sources of evidence for scholars. Wells-Barnett’s graphic details reveal the barbarism and lack of fear or remorse of the perpetrators of lynching.

Graphic descriptions, the use of editorials and firsthand accounts as evidence, and frank analysis are some of the most valuable aspects of Wells-Barnett’s three works. Unlike most female writers during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, she did not avoid violent or graphic topics and material. Wells-Barnett interviewed survivors and witnesses, and she referenced recorded accounts directly from local newspapers to show the horrors of extralegal violence in the United States. This means that much of the content of this book will stir an emotional response from many readers. You may feel anger, guilt, and sadness while reading Wells-Barnett’s words.

Guilt is a prominent emotion that comes up when learning about the history of the United States and its dependency on slavery. However, it is important to avoid letting this emotion cloud your understanding of historical events, issues, and ideas. History is not black and white—it is murky and complex. We can learn and be critical of the past without falling victim to the emotional weight of judging history by our current standards. We should avoid presentism, a term that means to judge the past by current standards and values. Instead, we should interpret facts and evidence in order to understand history.

If you are overwhelmed by the content, do not hesitate to pause and put the book away for a few hours, or until the next day. Additionally, you may want to talk to an instructor, professor, teacher, family member, or friend about the emotions you experience while reading the book. Although graphic in nature, these three pamphlets are significant because they show the depths of terror and violence African Americans experienced throughout the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

Today, understanding the history of lynching of African Americans provides