Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

I wondered why the preachers did not give the people practical talks.

I never cared for teaching, but I had always been very conscientious in trying to do my work honestly.

She believes there is no agency so potent as the press in reaching and elevating a people.

I told him that my good name was all that I had in the world, that I was bound to protect it from attack by those who felt that they could do so with impunity because I had no brother or father to protect it for me.

wanted him to know at least one southern girl, born and bred, who had tried to keep herself spotless and morally clean as my slave mother had taught me.

had demonstrated that I could make a living by my newspaper and need never tie myself down to school teaching.

There had been no lynchings in Memphis since the Civil War,

“So your own job then depends on Negro patronage?” I asked.

Ida B. Wells had no problem speaking the truth!

the lynching took place.” “But the streetcar company had nothing to do with the lynching,” said one of the men. “It is owned by northern capitalists.” “And run by southern lynchers,” I retorted.

I had bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers.

For the first time in their lives the white people of Memphis had seen earnest, united action by Negroes which upset economic and business conditions.

This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and “keep the nigger down.”

Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women.

It has been frequently charged in narratives of slave times that these white fathers often sold their mulatto children into slavery.

rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without let or hindrance, check or reproof from church, state, or press until there had been created this race within a race—and all designated by the inclusive term of “colored.”

No torture of helpless victims by heathen savages or cruel red Indians ever exceeded the cold-blooded savagery of white devils under lynch law.

The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income.

as soon as white southerners came into power they began to make playthings of Negro lives and property.

found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities to the world, the Negro was being branded as a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women.

white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so wherever they could,

the entire race should be branded as moral monsters and despoilers of white womanhood and childhood

Miss Patton was a graduate of Meharry Medical College, one of its first woman graduates,

I began by telling of conditions in the South since the Civil War, jim crow laws, ballot-box intimidation, and laws against intermarriage.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

“What you need in each community is a solid organization to fight race prejudice wherever shown.

Americans whose black skins are a bar to their receiving genuine kindness and courtesy at home.

the law refused to punish the murderers because it is not considered a crime to kill a Negro.

Many of the cases of “Assault” are simply adulteries between white women and colored men.

The Southerners of America had never been satisfied with the defeat they had sustained at the hands of the Northerners and the loss of their property in Negroes.

These ghastly murders are in fact the outcome of the race prejudice which has survived from the days of slavery.

our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.

It seems incredible to them that the Christian churches of the South refuse to admit Negro communicants into their houses of worship save in the galleries or in the back seats.