Ida B. Wells: “Lynching: Our National Crime”

Context

The public record of lynchings in the United States shows that during the post–Civil War era, lynching and other acts of mob violence steadily increased. While the victims of lynchings across the nation still included whites, Native Americans, Chicanos, and Asians, by 1892 the majority of victims were African American, and the majority of these murders were in the South. In that peak year, 241 men, women, and children were beaten, tortured, and killed in various ways. Of that total, 160 were identified as African American, a 200 percent increase over the previous ten years, when the number of African Americans lynched was fifty-two.

After the end of Reconstruction, southern whites confronted what they called the “Negro problem.” Solving that problem meant prohibiting blacks from voting and segregating blacks from whites socially. In 1883 the US Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations. In 1890, in what would become a pattern in the South, the state of Mississippi adopted a new constitution that disenfranchised blacks. To evade the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, southern states usually did not specifically cite race. Instead, they passed laws requiring voters to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test administered by white registrars as a way to disenfranchise most black voters. A flood of Jim Crow laws followed. The custom of racial segregation was written into statutes governing railroads, streetcars, parks, schools, prisons, theaters, and public facilities in general. Once again, to get around the equal protection clauses of the Constitution, a pretense was established that a separate black school or a second-class railway car was just as good as a white school or a first-class railway car. In 1896 the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, accepted the doctrine of “separate but equal” and paved the way for establishing a double standard across the South. In his dissenting opinion, Justice John M. Harlan took his fellow justices to task and argued that the Constitution was “color blind” and that the decision relegated blacks to a condition of legal inferiority.

In the meantime, neither the federal nor state governments took any steps to stem the rising incidence of violence against blacks. Black men and women were killed without having been tried and convicted of any capital crime. Being politically active could cause a black activist to be killed by an angry white mob. Likewise, economic success by black people often triggered violent retribution by local whites. As black men increasingly lost the ability to vote and influence politics, the number of racially motivated extralegal executions increased. More than one hundred individuals were lynched every year in the late nineteenth century, a practice that continued into the early twentieth century. Prominent community members often encouraged and even participated in lynch mobs.

White supremacists defended lynching as the proper punishment for black men who raped white women. But Wells discovered that only a minority of black victims had ever been accused of rape; even when rape was the charge, it was not always true. Instead, she found that blacks were being lynched for charges other than rape—for murder, burglary, arson, insolence toward whites, and attempting to exercise the right to vote. In her mind, the charge of rape was a falsehood. White-on-black violence was, she argued, all about maintaining power and control. Lynching, driven by racial prejudice, was a form of intimidation designed to keep black men from challenging (politically, economically, or socially) white supremacy.