Not that fear was a reasonable excuse for such silence. The most important contemporary work on lynching comes from the pioneering black female journalist Ida B. Wells, whose investigative reporting was integral to documenting and spreading word of what was happening in the southern states. Wells was justifiably scathing toward those “men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages,” denouncing them as criminal participants, accomplices, and “accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual law breakers who would
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