Anti-lynching

Advocating For Equal Rights: Ida B. Wells' Responsibility to Expose Injustice

Anti-Lynching

 Ida B. Wells' crusade against lynching shows how the responsibility to protect human rights requires active resistance against injustice. Wells' dedication to her anti-lynching campaign was sparked following the tragic lynching of her close friends—three successful Black businessmen.

Thomas Moss, Clavin McDowell, and Will Stewart, Black owners of a thriving grocery store, opened their business across from W.R. Barrett, a white man. Feeling threatened by their success, he accused them of running, "...a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on ...and a resort of thieves and thugs."​​​​​​​ They were arrested but later dragged from jail by a white mob. Before Moss was shot, he spoke his final words: “Tell my people to go West – there is no justice for them here.” Stewart and McDowell were shot and then McDowell's eyes were gouged out.

Devastated, Wells took on the responsibility of exposing the brutal realities of their lynchings.

"This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was: an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized."
-Ida B. Wells, Free Press, 1892

The People's Grocery Store

(Courtesy of Historic Memphis)

"Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so."
-Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, 1892

Wells wrote the pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases to expose the injustice of lynching and the truth that lynching was driven by racial hatred and discrimination. 

"When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched."
-Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, 1892

"Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves, and public sentiment will have a reaction; and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."
-Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, 1892

Wells’ Pamphlet About Lynching

(Courtesy of DPLA)

St. Andrews Citizen

(Courtesy of BNA)

Wells took on the responsibility of conducting a speaking tour in Britain. She highlighted the inhumane conditions in the South, including Jim Crow laws, ballot-box intimidation, and anti-intermarriage laws. She discussed the atrocities of lynchings and how white people denied Afro-Americans the right to a fair trial.

"The reports of the lynching cases, she said, were always biased by the perpetrators or their friends so as to represent the negro victims as desperate and immoral characters, and the lynchers of the South had grown bolder and bolder as the time went on."
-Ida B. Wells, 1893