Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900

211 Pages·2016·14.656 MB·English

by  Jacqueline Jones Royster

the bedford series in history and culture
Southern Horrors
and Other Writings
The Anti-Lynching Campaign
of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900
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the bedford series in history and culture
Southern Horrors
and Other Writings
The Anti-Lynching Campaign
of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900
SeCOnd edITIOn
Edited with an Introduction by
Jacqueline Jones Royster
Georgia Institute of Technology
Boston | New York
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For Bedford / St. Martin’s
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Cover Design: William boardman
Cover Photo: Portrait of ida b. Wells barnett, ca. 1893 (sepia photo), american school
(19th century) / Private collection / Prismatic Pictures / bridgeman images
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copyright © 2016, 1997 by bedford/st. Martin’s.
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Manufactured in the united states of america.
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isbn 978-1-319-04904-1
Acknowledgments
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Foreword
the bedford series in history and culture is designed so that readers
can study the past as historians do.
the historian’s first task is finding the evidence. documents, letters,
memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts
and clues. then the historian questions and compares the sources. there
is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is welcome, and
the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. dif-
ferent views of an event may be as important as a single verdict. how a
story is told may yield as much information as what it says.
along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and per-
haps from specialists in other disciplines. finally, it is time to write, to
decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers.
each book in this series contains an important historical document
or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open
to interpretation in different ways. the documents are combined with
some element of historical narrative — an introduction or a biographical
essay, for example — that provides students with an analysis of the pri-
mary source material and important background information about the
world in which it was produced.
each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific
historical period. each provides a basis for lively thought and discussion
about several aspects of the topic and the historian’s role. each is short
enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week assign-
ment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal reading,
each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the challenge —
and fun — of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past.
lynn hunt
david W. blight
bonnie G. smith
v
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Preface
since the 1997 publication of Southern Horrors and Other Writings,
research and scholarship related to african american life and culture,
and specifically social activism and leadership, have gained considerable
momentum. this trend has cast a far more intense light on the impor-
tance of looking beyond just the facts of activism as a set of events to
the larger historical frameworks in which those events occurred and
by which they can be more fully understood. Within this scholarly con-
text, ida b. Wells, as a high-performing social activist, is a persistent
subject of choice. born into slavery, Wells overcame many barriers to
garner respect as a nationally and internationally prominent journalist,
social activist, public speaker, and leader in various social movements.
Part one of this edition adds more insight into the historical dynamics,
exploring, for example, the yellow fever epidemic, that greatly steered
Wells’s life trajectory toward activism, and the importance of her legacy
for today’s students. Wells became one among a relatively small number
of “public” women in an era when public arenas were not considered the
place for women, and she earned a reputation as an outspoken and stead-
fast crusader for justice. the three selections in this volume — Southern
Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, A Red Record, and an excerpt from
her autobiography, Crusade for Justice — testify to her achievements and
the importance of understanding her legacy of activism.
Wells’s documents continue to play a key role in understanding com-
plex race relations and in understanding peace and justice as global
concepts. i have retained Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
and A Red Record from the first edition. as complements to each other,
these titles clearly state Wells’s position on lynching, revealing the insight
and perception with which she was able to launch the most successful
of the early anti-lynching campaigns. Wells disassembled and targeted
separately the many contradictions and hypocrisies built into the broad
myths that white apologists had used to justify lynching, making a case
for justice at a particular moment in time. through the pamphlets we
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viii Preface
can recognize lynchings as more than isolated incidents arbitrarily hap-
pening to african americans and occasionally to americans of other eth-
nic groups. We see instead lynching’s complex relationships to systems
of power and domination, to public discourse, and to social activism,
including the activism of african american women. Wells’s courageous
analysis helps us understand the told and untold stories of this sinister
thread in the fabric of american life.
With the current deepening of scholarly concerns, there is an addi-
tional opportunity in this second edition to further illuminate Wells as
a distinctive exemplar of leadership and action. i have therefore shifted
priorities away from Mob Rule in New Orleans, a case study of lynching
and its consequences in a specific site, to include instead a set of chapters
from Wells’s autobiography. the section that i chose to include focuses
on a crucial moment in her campaign, her first british tour, when Wells
gained leverage in pushing lynching to a higher level of attention nation-
ally and internationally. in Crusade for Justice, Wells tells her own story,
not so much as an intimate self-reported account of her life, but more as
a personal narrative of her growth and performance as a professional, or
what might be considered the telling of an “inside story” of her lifelong
campaign for social justice. by interrogating the dynamic convergences
of action, context, and actor, we broaden and deepen knowledge, not just
of the worthiness of historical acts as stand-alone deeds, but also the mak-
ing of them.
With the combination of Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and an
excerpt from Crusade for Justice, we can explore with a more holistic point
of view, not just Wells’s anti-lynching campaign, but also her operational
processes as an activist. this edition draws more attention to her path-
way toward activism and leadership, her view of what it meant for her
to stay the course, as well as the actions, contexts, and societal conse-
quences of her activism. the effort is to make more evident the impor-
tance of ethos, agency, and voice in fomenting social action, as well as
the complex interface of civil rights with human rights in the united
states and internationally. this approach underscores the idea that, for
Wells, her campaign was not just professional work — a thing to do. it
was an act of passion.
fundamentally, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-
Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 remains an occasion
to look at the anti-lynching movement at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury and at lynching and other violent acts over time as a disquieting
antithetical phenomenon in a nation that takes such pride in being a
place for justice and equality for all. for contemporary audiences, Wells’s
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