Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells

by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Miss Wells seems to think that as the Negro advances in education and in the qualities of good citizenship, the disinclination to allow him civil rights becomes deeper.

In advocating the cause Mr. Aked said a lynching, however bad for the Negro, was still worse for those who did it.

Mr. Celestine Edwards, a colored man, in seconding the proposition, maintained that war had never ended anything so as to permanently satisfy both the conquered and the conquerer. 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. This had been a thorn in their flesh for years, and he held that they would never succeed in ameliorating the conditions under which his race labored until the remnant of the old Abolitionists of America began the work where they had left it off, when the Civil War began. The Northerners, he acknowledged, had always been tolerant of Negro competition but the Southern whites could never abide it.

This caste based on color, so entirely foreign to them, is especially absurd coming from America which has always boasted so loudly of her democracy. The Negro still hopes that some day the United States will become as great intellectually and morally as she is materially.

We have endured much and we believe with patience; we have seen our world broken down, our men made fugitives and wanderers or their youth and strength spent in bondage. We ourselves are daily hindered and oppressed in the race of life; we know that every opportunity for advancement, for peace and happiness will be denied us; that in most sections Christian men and women absolutely refuse not only to live beside us and to eat with us, but also to open their churches to us; we know that our children, no matter with what tenderness they may have been reared, are considered legitimate prey for insult; that our young girls can at any time be thrust into foul and filthy cars and, no matter their needs, be refused food and shelter. We feel deeply the lack of opportunities for culture brought by the Public Libraries, the Concert and Lecture Halls, which are everywhere denied us in the South. We view these things with amazement, but realizing that prejudice can only be eliminated by time and our general progress, we have tried to bear these indignities put upon us by a professedly Christian people with the fortitude and dignity of real Christians. All this we have borne and do bear with more or less patience but in the interest of common humanity, in the interest of justice, for the good name of our country, we solemnly raise our voice against the horrible crimes of lynch law as practiced in the South, and we call upon Christians everywhere to do the same or be branded as sympathi...