Collected Works of Ida B. Wells Barnett

by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Genres: Social Justice, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2007

About the author

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist and, with her husband, newspaper owner Ferdinand L. Barnett, an early leader in the civil rights movement. She documented lynching in the United States, showing how it was often a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites, often under the guise of rape charges. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Monica]

Ida B Wells would have been 160 years old in July 2022. She was a remarkable woman and I'm in awe reading her original writings. There is a feel and realness here that cannot be captured by historians. One should read it for themselves. She was trying to raise awareness as a black female journalist reporting on the horrors of lynching primarily (but not limited to) the South.

"If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance"

I thought this book would be a quick read with its only 228 pages. But it is not. It was a catalogue of lynchings and one part reminiscent of Virginia Wolf where Barnett takes on well-meaning white women trying to curtail the "intelligent but wrong" Wells-Barnett's allegations against white people in general, white women in particular. Based on these writings, Wells-Barnett stated that many of the rationale behind the lynchings were made up. There were no real provocations other than murderous anger that needed to be vented. In particular, she noted that many of the men lynched for "rape" were Black men in consensual relationships with white women, many of which produced offspring. For these white women (some had husbands) to keep their social status or husbands to maintain their masculinity, these men had to die.

"This statement is not a shield for the despoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs."

What was interesting was that in some of these lynchings, the white women involved did not accuse their lovers of rape and often refused to identify them. They were turned in by other white folks. Wells-Barnett noted that the virtue of Black women at the hands of white men did not have similar value.

"To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power."

In addition to the "rape" of white women, Blacks were killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, standing up for themselves in business transactions, talking back to white people, talking to white women, standing up for other Black people, protecting their families, defending their homes, even for crimes like stealing eggs.

"Her white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race."

White people were also jailed, fined and occasionally murdered for recognizing Blacks as human beings and standing up for their rights. Far more than I expected to read about in the 1890s. The lynchings were horrific. After a while, these lynchings became normalized, cataloguing each one and listing them yearly state by state (mostly in the south). This was her purpose. Until her articles, many of the newspapers were listing these as matter-of-fact stuff. Died of natural causes, "man found dead" etc. Wells risked her life to report on these issues. According to Wells-Barnett,

"It is a contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic to demand that justice be done though the heavens fall."

Sounds familiar doesn't it?

The collection consisted of 3 of her most famous pamphlets: the aptly named Southern Horrors, The Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans. Most of this collection was written in the 80's and 90's. That's 1880's and 90's. The substance can be a little dry, repetitive, and inelegant but so very important. As I read the book, I felt Wells-Barnett's outrage, anger, and love for her people. She too, though a product of her time and educated, did not understand how white people of good moral character could allow these murders to continue. Frederick Douglass supported her efforts fully and encouraged her to continue writing saying "Brave woman you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.". Indeed, it's hard to imagine a Black man reporting on these issues with such firsthand observations. Though she implies there were a few times that she had to get out of town rapidly. She reported on events primarily in the South. She said "There is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South." In fact she surmised that its actually worse during the reconstruction as when they were slaves, they had monetary value to white folks, and they didn't kill with impunity. Now free peoples, their lives held no value in the South.

What rocked me to my core was how much of what Wells-Barnett observed and said, still resonates today. It should be shameful in many ways that her era and the current era have so many similarities. I can't help but think of January 6, 2021, when I read,

"We have reached the unprecedented low level; the awful criminal depravity of substituting the mob for the court and jury, of giving up the jail keys to the mob whenever they are demanded."

On voting rights

"But it was a bootless strife for colored people. The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right."

And one only needs to read up on current events in Spaulding County Georgia in order to see this is still true

"The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be a "barren ideality," and regardless of numbers, the colored people found themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to rule."

On the South. Once doesn't have to look very far to see this is still true…Jackson, Mississippi water crisis…

"The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled."

and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia where no action by the district attorney was taken until one of the defendants released a video of the event that had been in the hands of law enforcement for months with no action,

"The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them."

And how often have we heard the GOP refer to protests as riots and alleging crimes?

"From 1865 to 1872, hundreds of colored men and women were mercilessly murdered, and the almost invariable reason assigned was that they met their death by being alleged participants in an insurrection or riot."

Sigh. I can only imagine the peril that Wells-Barnett invited by reporting this. I was both transfixed and horrified reading this text, the contents written well over 125 years ago. Mob Rule in particular felt like it could happen again and maybe already has. Ida B Wells-Barnett was an amazing woman, and I would recommend reading her writing if only to understand how the past and the future, unfortunately have far too much in common. We need to know history to understand and prevent a repeat. Important and an amazing time capsule. Read it but be warned that history in such detail is far more horrific than most fiction if for no other reason than it actually happened...

4.5 Stars more for the data and the accomplishment of reporting

Read on kindle

[Christine]

Her three most famous studies. Good collection.

[Rita]

A hard and brutal America

So sad yet true, and the beat goes on. The only changes are the methods and the times. This read awakens the soul.

[Bailey]

Disturbingly relevant over 120 years later.

[Vince]

To read history is one thing. To read history penned by those living it in real time is a far richer and more intimate experience. This collection of Wells' best known treatises on the scourge of lynching during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will curdle your blood and singe your soul. Wells, an icon of the anti-lynching movement and committed soldier in the fight for equal treatment under the law, used her pen and her voice to call public attention to the torture and murder of Black men and women in the South often at her own peril. Vigilante mobs of Southern "Redeemers" used any pretext to persecute the formerly enslaved as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement by any means possible. Using lying cries of rape or theft, the mobs would hunt down and murder hundreds of Black Americans over this period. Wells cataloged the cases and published the statistics and details of these lynching in a number of publications. The essays are excruciatingly painful to read but read you must as these events are sadly relevant today. I would encourage anyone who is concerned about the never ending struggle for civil rights to pick up this book.