Ida B. Wells and lynching in the U.S.

Résumé du document

Either called "the Princess of the press" or "the Afro-American Agitator", Ida B. Wells left nobody indifferent. Her struggle started during a period called "the nadir of race relations" in the U.S., from which lynching as a phenomenon was one element. This practice in itself illustrates how much the emancipation was not a progress but a regression. In the 1870s, the North abandoned the goal of protecting black Americans. After 1890, racism worsened throughout the country, especially in the South. Most white Southerners did not ask for Reconstruction but for Redemption. As slavery no longer existed, they employed new extreme measures to return to the old social order. Lynching was the most telling form of terrorist violence and a symptom of the failure of Reconstruction. In a book that she wrote with Frederick Douglass and Ferdinand Barnett, published in 1893. The reason why the colored American is not in the world's Columbian Exposition, Wells traced the origin of Lynch Law. It was used for the first time by the colonel William Lynch in Virginia. He allowed a group of citizens to kill horse thieves and counterfeiters. It opened the way to the infliction of punishment by private and unauthorized citizens. When freed, Negroes were still viewed as sub-humans.

Extraits

[...] The targets of lynching were Negroes who were politically active (going to the polls), culturally threatening (able to teach, answering back) or economically prosperous. It was a victim of this last category that made Wells start an anti-lynching campaign. A friend of her and his companions were lynched for owning a thriving business in Memphis. She immediately started a protest and was not afraid to take the leadership. She encouraged her black fellows to leave Memphis or to boycott the streetcar line. Thus, we understand her attitude was not in keeping with Booker T. [...]

[...] It happened several times and she did not want to resist him, she loved being with him. To this, Wells's reaction was simple and logical: man who is colored shall not be hanged for an offense, which, if he were white, would not be adjudged a crime." Furthermore, white men had actually no particular respect for women. Wells took the examples of the "Nigger teachers" treated as "offenders of the social ethics of the South", insulted and ostracised for having taught Negroes. [...]

[...] In The Red Record, Wells listed the excuses used by her opponents. By doing so, she exposed their inherent absurdity. First, lynchings were said to be legitimized by an attempt to repress "race riots". In fact, these insurrections were not planned by Negroes, they were victims: "only Negroes were killed during the rioting" while "all the white men escaped unharmed". She challenged the origin of violence. Secondly, lynchings were said to prevent a black political domination from happening. The KKK members[3], calling themselves "the Regulators", killed Negroes "whose only crime was the attempt to exercise their right to vote". [...]

[...] With such depictions, we have as readers the impression to read a story from the Middle-Ages. Douglass and Wells have a common point that surely explains their intellectual harmony. They were former slaves and mulattoes. Their sole existence proves white people's hypocrisy. Wells' main case in point was to reveal that white males could not be chivalric when they themselves had fathered numerous biracial children in the South, usually by rape of black female slaves. III. Finally, we can assert that Ida B. [...]

[...] Wells appealed to patriotism to make people react. In The Red Record, she explained, beyond the color line, that innocent or imbecile people were killed, children included. In Jonesville, Louisiana, a boy of sixteen and a girl of fourteen were lynched because their father was suspected of murder. When she mentioned the lynching of an innocent father whose son was in a relationship with a white girl, Wells emphasized that it took pace in Indiana, a state, "which furnished the U.S. [...]