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

killing and Women Ida B. Wells liberate blacks, after the Civil War, continued to live in fear of lynching, a practice of vigilantism that was often based on false accusations. Lynching was non only a way for southern lily-white men to uphold racial justice, it was also a means of keeping women, white and black, to a lower place the control of a violent white male ideology. In receipt to the injustices of lynching, the anti-lynching movement was establisheda campaign in which women played a key role. Ida B. Wells, a black teacher and journalist was at the chief and early development of this movement. In 1892 Wells was one of the first intelligence information reporters to bring the truths of lynching to proper media attention. Her first articles appeared in The Free wrangle and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper that she co-edited. She urged the black townspeople of Memphis to move west and to fend the coercive violence of lynching. 1 Her early articles were collected in Southern Horrors Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a widely distributed pamphlet that heart-to-heart the innocence of many victims of lynching and attacked the leaders of white southern communities for allowing such(prenominal) atrocities. 2 In 1895 Wells published a larger investigative report, A Red Record, which exposed how false or contrived accusations of rape go with less than one third of the cases documented around 1892. 3 The statistics and literature of A Red Record denounced the dominant white male ideology on a lower floorstructure lynching the thought that white womanhood was in need of protection against black men. Wells challenged this notion as a concealed racist agenda that functioned to keep white men in power 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 nevertheless accused of rape or attempted rape. 4 Royster. Southern Horrors and Other belles-lettres (30).5 Brown states, Southern white men had a compelling urge to punish even a hint of impropriety that encroached on their ownership 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.