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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

After her three friends were lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892, Wells began collecting statistics on the number of individuals murdered by angry mobs and the alleged causes of those crimes. To present an intellectual context for her statistics and to underscore the fallacy of the southern defense of white-on-black violence, Wells examined the problem historically. She soon discovered that rape was not even charged in more than two-thirds of the cases that resulted in lynching and that of those actually charged with rape, guilt was questionable in many cases. If rape was not the real explanation for the increase in the number of lynchings, then what was? Wells concluded that the real cause was racial terrorism. White fears of Negro insurrection during slavery had given way to white fears of black rule during Reconstruction, which, in turn, had been superseded by white fears of African American advancement after 1877. Legalized segregation and political disenfranchisement served as reminders that the black man was still regarded as inferior. Lynching was a form of intimidation, while rape served as an excuse for brutality and the metaphor in the mind of the white southerner for any challenge to white supremacy.

In ”Lynching: Our National Crime,” her address before the organizing convention of the NAACP in 1909, Wells repeats her earlier arguments that lynching is “color line murder” and provides statistics to show that blacks are disproportionately the victims of those crimes. In assessing the increase in what she calls “mob murder,” Wells charges that it is an “indictment against American civilization—the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.” She also challenges the explanation that “Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.” To Wells, this is nothing more than a “shameless falsehood,” and she believes that crimes against women are the excuses for rather than the causes of such actions. Dismissing the southern defense of lynching, Wells makes reference to the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, to underscore the hypocrisy of that argument.

In the remainder of the document, Wells suggests that “an appeal to law” is the only way to abolish the “lynching infamy.” She acknowledges what had become to many an apparent truth: that state governments often turn a blind eye to “unbridled lawlessness” that “defies state laws.” Obviously, a more substantial deterrent was needed. For Wells, this would include the passage of federal antilynching legislation and a federal bureau to investigate and publicize the details of every lynching. “Federal protection of American citizenship,” she states, is the way to stop lynching. “Lawbreakers,” she argues, “must be made to know that human life is sacred” and that “every citizen in the country is first a citizen of the United States and secondly a citizen of the state in which he belongs.” She notes that the problem, once seen as sectional, is now national (as the Springfield riot clearly demonstrated). Active enforcement of a new federal law is, she contends, the only way to “make life, liberty, and property secure against mob rule.”