Ida B Wells-Barnett

During the 1890s, Ida Wells-Barnett began documenting lynching in the United States. Her findings, which were based on frequent claims that lynchings were reserved for black criminals only, were published in articles and through her pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases. Wells exposed lynching as a barbaric practice of whites in the South used to intimidate and oppress African Americans who created economic and political competition-and...

This is an impressive, moving, and disturbing account of racial violence and lynchings, with the central part of the story focused on the final fight for his life of Robert Charles. Charles appears nearly heroic even as he kills four police officers and two civilians and wounds twenty more by gunfire, because Ida B. Wells-Barnett portrays this as the fallout of an unprovoked assault upon Charles and his desperation to fight against his own lynching...

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...

"Wells...provided damning descriptions of the melee that claimed one too many black lives." -Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2014) "To Wells...the events at East St. Louis combined some of the worst racist elements...in three days of rioting, 39 African Americans were killed." -Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform (2003) "Her account of the riot which included interviews with riot victims documenting the violent...

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was an American educator, investigative journalist, and leading figure of the civil rights movement. Having been born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was freed in 1862 during the American Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation. From then on she dedicated her life as a free woman to fighting prejudice and violence, founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and...

In the post-civil war American south, the despicable act of lynching was commonplace and considered to be a form of vigilantism that was used to murder African Americans for alleged "crimes" ranging from acting suspiciously to "insulting whites". In Wells' 1892 book "Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All its Phases", Ida Bell Wells-Barnett describes many horrific instances when the law turned a blind eye to the barbaric practice of lynching, in an attempt...