On lynchings by Ida B Wells

¶ … Lynchings

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an African-American woman and journalist noted for her work in detailing the prevalence of the murder of blacks by lynching, largely but not entirely in the South at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Her writings are collected in the book on Lynching, a book that describes many cases of lynching and that shows a deep sense of outrage that such actions take place in a country that ostensibly lives by law and that renounced the institution of slavery while not really giving the former slaves full citizenship.

Wells-Barnett had lived in the South when she started writing about this subject, but she was threatened and moved to Chicago, from where she continued to write about the lynchings taking place in different parts of the South. She would travel to the site of these murders even though she was at great risk doing so. Her courage an d her dedication would be repeated much later in the Civil Rights era as journalists and others went to the Old South and reported on the racism they found there and on the injustices that continued to be practiced. This included continuing reports of lynchings, one of the best known of which was the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. reading the reports by Wells-Barnett is truly a look back at an earlier age and at the horrors faced by African-Americans at that time, and the fact that these sorts of crimes would continue more or less openly well into the 1960s is a terrible indictment of a segment of society. While the reports by Wells-Barnett were largely written about actions in the South, that sort of racism and even that sort of murder was not uncommon in the North as well.

Wells-Barnett had pointed out that some of the lynchings in the South in the 1890s used the racist attitudes of the time as a way for some white businessmen to eliminate black competitors who would not be deterred any other way. When she was forced to move to the North, she continued what was by then a crusade against the way her people were treated and the way many whites were using violence to keep the black population in line. Her first pamphlet on the subject was called "Southern Horrors," and she wrote about mob violence in places like New Orleans and Georgia. Reading these works today serves not only as cries against the injustice of the time but also as historical documents showing the reader another time and place, a time that contributed to the history of the African-American community and that helps explain many of the conflicts that continue to this day.

Another aspect of the practices of the time is made evident as the author points out many crimes committed by white citizens against black people, crimes that were usually ignored and rarely punished. She notes how oe man was arrested for attempted rape in a neighbor's cook. Because he was drunk, the "grand jury refused to indict him and he was discharged" (Wells-Barnett 38). Many cases of lynching involved mere accusations against black men of similar attempts on white women, a claim repeated in 1955 with then Emmett Till killing. Wells-Barnett cites Bishop Fitzgerald to the effect that those in the North who were sympathetic to the victims of lynching were failing to show "sympathy for the white woman in the case" (Wells-Barnett 39). The number of black people killed each year by lynch mobs was high, and the author note the number for different years and shows how that number had been steady or increasing for a decade or more. Once slavery was ended by government fiat, many took revenge on the black population whenever possible and showed racist attitudes in their violence.

Wells-Barnett notes at the beginning of "Southern Horrors" that she takes no pleasure in recounting "the corruption here exposed" but also stats that someone has to "show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning" (Wells-Barnett 25). She takes on this role because of the high death toll caused by lynching and the way this violence threatens the community and contributes to an ongoing view of blacks as a criminal class subject to harsh punishment because of some inherent evil in the race. To a degree, large segments of the white population used this as a way of asserting superiority and to show that the white race was moral while the black race was not.

That this was achieved by murder was an irony that Wells-Barnett found to be horrible and frightening. Her outrage never flags, and she proves this by pursuing one case after another and writing about the experience so the many victims will not be tarred with the criminal taint the mob wants to place upon them.

Wells-Barnett noted in an editorial in 1892 that many of the lynchings were for "the same old racket -- the new alarm about raping white women" (Wells-Barnett 29). Shew also calls this "the old threadbare lie" that no one believes and that could lead to a public reaction against those white men perpetrating these deeds, as well as against the reputation of their women (Wells-Barnett 29). This argument on both sides shows the way racism and sexism were intertwined and would show a number of forces at work in white society, forces suggesting a social order that was not as stable or as powerful as it wanted to think. The insecurities of the white male after the loss in the Civil War may have been a contributing factor. Open racism was also one of the products of Reconstruction and the belief of many in the South that the North was intent on punishing them for the war. Tensions between the two communities would continue over issues such as employment (with whites believing they had a right to the bet jobs and blacks had no rights at all).

In addition to noting the crimes committed against her race, Wells-Barnett notes ways in which the white power structure would close ranks to protect its own and to demonize African-Americans. She cites various newspaper editorials that supported the idea of lynching, not always openly but by defending those accused of such acts and by suggesting that these actions would not take place if blacks were not committing crimes in the first place. Wells-Barnett also sees these actions as flowing from the "unbridled power exercised for two and a half centuries, by the white man over the Negro" (Wells-Barnett 57). The new violence was thus only an extension of the way whites had viewed themselves for so long and the inferior position they had given to the black people they had dragged here in the first place. After Emancipation, the white man had lost any vested interests in the Negro's body, but the white people in the South had been trained otherwise for so long that they continued to act as if they had the same rights as always and as if the world had not changed.