Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

Ida B. Wells was already an accomplished journalist and dedicated activist when the March 1892 lynching of one of her friends in her hometown of Memphis compelled her to take action and begin speaking out against the barbaric practice, which was at that time prevalent across the American South. Employed as editor of the Free Speech, Memphis’s Black newsletter, Wells wrote about the shocking lack of attention and intervention on the part of law enforcement and repudiated the idea that lynchings were solely a response to accusations of rape. The myth of the Black male rapist, who presented a constant and significant threat to white women’s proposed innocence and purity, permeated the American South following the Civil War, reaching its peak in the 1880s. Although regionally they did not engage in the same levels of violence against Black men, Northern white people had come to believe in the myth as well. Wells argued in her publications that lynching was a prime example of the barbarism of which Black men were often accused, and it was the white male participants who were in fact the barbarians for the cruelty they demonstrated in executing others without trial. She focused on dispelling the myth of the Black male rapist and on bringing the attention of the public to the fact that many Black men were lynched on suspicion of other crimes, not sexual assault. Wells’s own friend, Thomas Moss, had been tortured before executed, and he, along with two other friends, had been murdered simply for owning a successful store that competed with a local white store.

Wells also suggested that those Americans from Northern states, including those Northern newspapers that covered lynchings, bore some culpability for failing to consistently and pervasively denounce the practice. In the press, Northern publications sometimes treated lynchings as news of a common Southern practice instead of condemning them for being barbaric. Northern journalists frequently depicted lynch mobs as orderly assemblages of citizens seeking to exact hometown justice and not as the emotional, vicious, and violent gangs they indeed were.

In one of her articles, Wells faced significant backlash and threats to her life when she suggested that perhaps interactions between white women and Black men that resulted in those lynchings that were associated with rape accusations had not been rapes at all but consensual interactions. Wells further attacked the duplicity of white Southern men who were preoccupied with the perceived slight of rampant Black rapists preying on white Southern women while clearly white Southern men had no qualms about regularly and repeated assaulting Black women and girls for their sexual gratification over the previous several centuries.

Realizing she would not receive the attention, respect, or support she sought in the United States, Wells traveled to England to expose the reality of lynchings, enlisting the help of the English middle and upper classes in inciting change in the United States. Wells understood her opinion as a Black woman lacked the power to damage the practice of lynching, but she was aware of the high esteem in which Americans held the opinions of the English. Wells believed that once the British learned of what was occurring in the United States, they would share in her horror, and their poor opinion and disapproving response would present significant enough pressure to force action back in America. She was correct in her presumption, and her English allies publicly denounced the practice and had gone even further by planning mission trips to the South to intervene in the practice. Many Americans responded with disdain to the poor opinions being offered and the forthcoming interventions being mustered by the English, claiming they had no business interfering in American affairs. Mission trips that had been organized by the English were abandoned in the wake of this strong response. Other Americans, however, had been sufficiently shamed as Wells had hoped. There were other successes as a result of her efforts: Northern newspapers changed the ways in which they depicted and wrote about lynchings, and in certain instances law enforcement began to intervene during the process of lynching and to prosecute participants. She did not achieve the lasting change she truly desired, however, as the combined influence of her collaboration with the English did not result in sufficient social pressure.