Wells became the nation’s chief cataloguer of lynchings, but more than that she filled in the empty spaces of Josiah Strong’s account of Anglo-Saxon domination and demonstrated how white Americans established that domination and repulsed what they regarded as threats to it. She discovered that no matter what the original reasons for the mob violence, newspapers turned them into stories of the rape of a white woman by a black man. Wells showed that in some cases the rape accusations disguised consensual sex, and in most other cases the original reasons for the lynchings had nothing to do with
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