In the words of Miss Ida B. Wells: The student of American sociology will find the year of 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land. She is depicting a period of time in American history stained with the blood of hundreds of free African American men, women and children. These people were unjustly slaughtered through the practice of lynching within the South. Wells was an investigative journalist and was involved in exploring, reporting, publishing literature on, and eventually campaigning against the tragedy that became lynching. Through initial research she became aware of these atrocities occurring as spectacle within an alarmingly large, and even more notably, segregated, population of the United States. She dedicated over a decade to her cause, publishing three pamphlets in eight years, while also traveling to England twice to gain support for her anti-lynching campaign. In reading her work, one may get the feeling that Wells really was a master of her craft. She became aware of an extremely barbaric aspect of society, and she utilized every asset available to her in order to expose the facts surrounding the half-truths and whole lies established to justify this inhumane act. She diligently gathered the truth and compiled her writing very carefully. Using reliable statistics employed to document the atrocious number of these occurrences and actual accounts of individual events used to precisely convey the gruesome details of the crimes, she put forth exceptionally convincing arguments an...
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...nd it was through her continuous attention to reporting detail that she was able to have such an effect on the society. The accounts of lynchings throughout her works are horrific and proved extremely difficult to read. Although the inclusion of these appalling descriptions adds the extra emphasize needed to really send the message home that something needed to be done about the problem at hand. It is not until we face the brutal facts that we are able to fully understand an issue in entirety. In 2009, “15,241 people were murdered; an estimated 88,097 were forcibly raped, and another estimated 806,843 were victims of aggravated assaults nationwide.” When presented in such alarming statistics, those nameless murders and rapes the local newscaster slips into her monologue every night become slightly less forgettable.
Works Cited
Southern Horrors and Other Writings
One of the most appalling practices in history, lynching — the extrajudicial hanging of a person accused of a crime — was commonplace in American society less than 100 years ago. The word often conjures up horrifying images of African Americans hanging from lampposts or trees. However, what many do not know is that while African Americans certainly suffered enormously at the hands of a white majority, they were not the only victims of this practice. In fact, the victims of the largest mass lynching in American history were Chinese (Johnson). On October 24th, 1871, a white mob stormed into the Chinatown of Los Angeles.
Interestingly, the book does not focus solely on the Georgia lynching, but delves into the actual study of the word lynching which was coined by legendary judge Charles B Lynch of Virginia to indicate extra-legal justice meted out to those in the frontier where the rule of law was largely absent. In fact, Wexler continues to analyse how the term lynching began to be used to describe mob violence in the 19th century, when the victim was deemed to have been guilty before being tried by due process in a court of law.
A pivotal point in the journey of Mrs. Wells came in 1883 when she was physically removed from a first-class train car by a white train conductor who was attempting to enforce the Sou...
By the end of the 19th century, lynching was clearly the most notorious and feared means of depriving Bl...
Four black sharecroppers (Roger Malcom, Dorothy Malcom, George Dorsey and Mae Murray Dorsey) are brutally murdered by a group of white people. The murders attracted national attention, but the community was not willing to get involved. The community was not fazed by these brutal murders but, by the fact that this incident got national attention. They were even more astounded that the rest of the nation even cared. In this book Laura Wexler shows just how deep racism goes. After reading the book I discovered that Fire in a Canebrake has three major themes involving racism. The first is that racism obstructs progression. The second is history repeats itself. The last theme is that racism can obscure the truth. This lynching, in particular, marks a turning point in the history of race relations and the governments’ involvement in civil rights. In the end this case still remains unsolved. No concept of the
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
Hi, my name is Ida Bell Wells-Barnett also known as Ida B. Wells. I was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. My father, James Wells, worked as a carpenter. My mother, Elizabeth “Izzy Bell” Warrenton, worked as a cook. I was born into slavery, owned by Mr.Bollings who treated us fairly well. I was the oldest daughter out of 9 siblings. My father was involved with the Freedmen's Aid Society and helped start Shaw University, known as Rust College, for the newly freed slaves. I received my early schooling there until age 16. In 1878, both my parents and one of my siblings died in a yellow fever outbreak. I cared for my siblings and got a job as a teacher. In 1882, I attended Fisk University in Nashville. I took college courses
Ida B. Wells was born into slavery, and lived in Holly Springs Mississippi. She was later freed, and learned from her parents what it meant to be a political activist. By 1891, Wells was the owner of the newspaper, Free Speech, and was reporting on the horrors that were occurring in the south. Wells, along with other people of the African American activist community were particularly horrified about the lynching’s that were occurring in the south. As a response to the lynching that was occurring, and other violent acts that the African American community was dealing with Wells wrote three pamphlets: Southern Horrors, The Red Record, and Mob Brutality. Muckraking and investigative journalism can be seen throughout these pamphlets, as well as Wells intent to persuade the African American community, and certain members of the white community to take a stand against the crime of lynching. Wells’ writings are an effective historical text, because she serves as a voice to an underrepresented African American community.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett is an investigative journalist who wrote in honesty and bluntness about the tragedies and continued struggles of the Negro man. She was still very much involved with the issue even after being granted freedom and the right to vote. Statistics have shown that death and disparity continued to befall the Negro people in the South where the white man was “educated so long in that school of practice” (Pg. 677 Par. 2). Yet in all the countless murders of Negroes by the white man only three had been convicted. The white man of the South, although opposed to the freedom of Negroes would eventually have to face the fact of the changing times. However, they took every opportunity and excuse to justify their continued horrors. There were three main excuses that the white man of the South came up w...
Ida B. Wells was dedicated to journalism and letting people know what is going on. With her journalism investigation instincts, she uses to identify what excuses the whites use to identify lynch campaign against blacks. In the following essay, I will explain what reasons for this vicious and sustained campaign of violence against African-Americans.
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors. Lynch Law in All Its Phase. New York: New York Age Print, 1892. Print. 6.
In Abbeville, Alabama 1944 the investigation into the horrific gang-rape of Recy Taylor, a young black mother by six white assailants is one of the crimes that began with a vivid description of Recy Taylor’s rape and Rosa Parks’ investigation of the incident. After the investigation, Parks, with the help of other local Alabama black women, organized the Committee for Equal Justice, which raised money and fought for a fair prosecution of Taylor’s attackers. The Taylor case politically charged scores of African American men and women on a national level and set the stage for “sexual violence and interracial rape [to become] the battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal ...
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
African-Americans aged 12 and up are the most victimized group in America. 41.7 over 1,000 of them are victims of violent crimes, compared with whites (36.3 over 1,000). This does not include murder. Back then during the era of the Jim Crow laws, it was even worse. However, during that time period when there were many oppressed blacks, there were many whites who courageously defied against the acts of racism, and proved that the color of your skin should not matter. This essay will compare and contrast two Caucasian characters by the names of Hiram Hillburn (The Mississippi Trial, 1955) and Celia Foote (The Help), who also went against the acts of prejudice.
Her parents nurtured the background of this crusader to make her a great spokesperson. She also held positions throughout her life that allowed her to learn a lot about lynching. She was fueled by her natural drive to search for the truth.