Ida B. Wells A Red Record

Background Ida B. Wells was born the daughter of slave parents on July 16, 1862 in Holy Springs, Mississippi Her parents and siblings died of yellow fever when she was only 14. She attended school at the Missouri Freedman’s school and Rust University Wells began teaching school at 14

In 1891, she was barred from teaching for criticizing the educational opportunities for African-Americans. She then invested her savings into the Memphis Free Press. In 1892, she outspokenly criticized the lynching of three prominent African- American businessmen. As a result, her newspaper office was destroyed.

In 1895, she wrote for the Conservator and published The Red Record, which was a book length expose of lynching. After a life of organizing and writing, she died in Chicago on March 25, 1931.

Main Points Ida Wells documented extralegal lynchings to expose their illegality and barbarity. The real condition of the child was not as brutal as claimed –“the father and his friends, at once shamefully exaggerated the facts and declared that the babe had been ruthlessly assaulted and then killed. –“the white people of the community made it a point to exaggerate every detail of the awful affair, and to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.” –“Person’s who saw the after its death, have stated, under the most solemn pledge to truth, that there was no evidence of such an assault as was published at the time, only a slight abrasion and discoloration was noticeable and that mostly about the neck.

The authorities made an example out of Smith. –“They determined to make an example of him and proceeded to carry out their purpose with unspeakably greater ferocity than that which characterized the half crazy object of their revenge…” People from various parts of Texas and Arkansas came to see the lynching.

Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.

Spectacle lynching. The Burning and Lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco Texas Although accurate figures on the lynching of blacks are lacking, one study estimates that in Texas between 1870 and 1900, extralegal justice was responsible for the murder of about 500 blacks—only Georgia and Mississippi exceeded Texas’s numbers in this grisly record. Between 1900 and 1910, Texas mobs murdered more than 100 black people. In 1916 at Waco, approximately 10,000 whites turned out in holiday-like atmosphere to watch a mob mutilate and burn a black man named Jesse Washington. (Source: Calvert, De Leon and Cantrell, The History of Texas, pp. 189, )

The lynching of Lige Daniels. August 3, 1920, Center, Texas.