32. Ida B. Wells

“A conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” -Ida B. Wells

On May 21, 1892, Ida B. Wells published a new anti-lynching editorial in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, the city’s Black newspaper of which she was a co-owner. It was to be her last for the publication. When the article was printed, its contents so outraged the local white population that they formed a mob and visited the newspaper’s offices with the intention of doing harm. Fortunately for Wells, she was out of town at the time, but the mob burned down the office, putting the paper out of business for good. Nor were local whites satisfied with even that. Assuming the author of Wells’ article was a man, one Memphis paper published an editorial calling for her castration, while others, even after discovering she was a woman, made similarly dire threats. Wells decamped for Chicago and never returned.

What was it about this column that struck a special nerve? Above all, Wells’ anti-lynching arguments were based on exposing the misguided, and highly racialized, understanding of gender roles in the Jim Crow south. The standard Southern conception of gender cast the white woman as the embodiment of virtue, white men the protector of that virtue, and Black men its inevitable despoiler. The principle justification for lynching in the late 19^th century was that it was a necessary punishment for, and deterrent to, Black men raping white women, a crime that inflamed the (white, male) Southern imagination like no other and set it to righteous violence. But as Wells points out, Black men (and sometimes women and children) were liable to be lynched for any offense at all, with alleged rape being the cause in less than a third of the cases and even then the charges almost always being false. In almost all cases where rape was cited, the relationship was consensual, a hard truth for many Southern white men to accept. As Wells puts it in her first anti-lynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, “White men lynch the offending Afro American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.”

Recasting the white woman in the role of seducer, Wells makes use of the rhetorical strategy most likely to inflame white anger. And it’s this very charge that she leveled so forcefully in the Free Speech editorial that caused all the trouble. “Nobody believes in the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote. “If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach 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.” These words that ended up proving so pivotal in her career, both as a terse encapsulation of her argument and as the cause of her exile, are ones she quotes several times throughout her subsequent work—citing them twice in quick succession at the beginning of Southern Horrors, and again, three years later, in her groundbreaking 1895 pamphlet, A Red Record—marshalled in service of Wells’ project of media criticism.

And it is, ultimately, as a media critic that Wells does some of her most important work. Wells begins Southern Horrors with a discussion of the “incident” at the Free Speech, first quoting her infamous passage and then citing the responses of two white papers, the first of which quotes her quote. By juxtaposing her words with those of her detractors, Wells exposes the faulty logic of the lynch-defending whites, pointing up their fevered call to violence for the depraved measure it is. If here she lets the words of the white papers largely damn themselves, though, then her work of media criticism finds more detailed expression throughout the rest of the pamphlet, particularly in Chapter Four, “The Malicious and Untruthful White Press.”

In that section, Wells gives further insight into the operations of the local white papers in Memphis, focusing in particular on their coverage of the so-called “Lynching at the Curve,”  the murder of three people who owned/worked at a Black grocery store in South Memphis, using a combination of the papers’ own words and her own analysis to point up their crooked thinking. Showing how the papers both employ specific descriptors like “toughs” and “desperadoes” to describe Black citizens and perpetrate outright lies, as when a consensual relationship between a Black man and an 18-year-old white woman was deliberately misreported as the rape of an 8-year-old girl, Wells exposes the working methods by which the white Southern papers justify barbarity. “Note the wording,” she reminds us, asking us to pay close attention as she exposes the lying language of these white supremacist publications.

Wells’ intertextual approach, heavy on both quotation and analysis, continues throughout her other works, particularly A Red Record, her longest and most formally exploratory pamphlet. This work, which again quotes Wells’ career-defining passage from the Free Speech, takes advantage of the looseness of the format to produce a hybrid text. Detailed analysis of the practice of lynching, the false justifications for the crime, and the white media’s logic-bending excuses, rub up against a host of other materials, the most striking of which are perhaps two lengthy lists of all the known lynching victims of 1893 and 1894. Wells then juxtaposes these lists with in-depth descriptions of a number of individual cases, providing both the hard data and the specific horrors, neither of which is sufficient to tell the whole story on its own. As African American lit scholar Jacqueline Goldsby puts it, “A Red Record’s narrative experiments remind us that lynching’s history was as varied and complex as it was widespread, and that analyzing it required flexibility and innovation from those who cared to understand it.” By calling on a variety of materials, Wells offers a multi-faceted approach to reporting, one that understands the complexity of the stories she’s covering, that presents that story from multiple vantage points, and that offers a stark contrast to the narrow thinking of the white journalism she opposed. Concerned with the role of the press throughout her work, in A Red Record Wells offers her most incisive bit of media criticism, not merely through her penchant for detailed analysis but by way of her sheer formal multiplicity as well.