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

After reading these accounts from late 19th and early 20th century U.S.A. of lynching by mostly white men with complicity and at times instigation and encouragement from white women, against black men, women and children, I am disgusted and discouraged with humanity. Although I had heard the song Strange Fruit and even read the poem and was somewhat aware of this history, nothing prepared me for the gruesomeness and inhumanity I read in these pages.

Ida B. Wells was an incredible activist and journalist and what a debt we owe her for recording with fact and reason these bloody and horrid accounts. Any gaslighting, needless arguments about the past being the past will result with an immediate block.

In Chicago, Ida B. Wells is known as the name behind a housing project, but in her day she was a crusader against alternative facts, specifically the myths that perpetuated lynching. These essays are drawn from her newspaper work, and in turn from the black press and a few mainstream sources, like the Chicago Tribune, that were not complicit in ignoring the issue. Wells largely builds fact upon fact and lets their weight support her argument. Does this Gilded Age technique still work? We'll soon see.

This brief volume introduces readers to the prominent reformer and journalist Ida B. Wells and her late-nineteenth-century crusade to abolish lynching. Built around three crucial documents - Well's pamphlet Southern Horrors (1892), her essay A Red Record (1895), and her case study Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900) - the volume shows how Wells defined lynching for an international audience as an issue deserving public concern and action. The editor's introduction places lynching in its historical context and provides important background information on Well's life and career. Also included are illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index.