Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi

SOUTHERN WHITE MEN were “shielding” themselves “behind the plausible screen of defending the honor” of their women through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in Southern Horrors, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. “The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,” she declared, “the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.”