Ida B. Wells acted as a documentarian of those atrocities, risking her own life many times over to force Americans to recognize the scourge of lynching. “If the Southern people in defense of their lawlessness, would tell the truth and admit that colored men and women are lynched for almost any offense, from murder to a misdemeanor, there would not now be the necessity for this defense,” she wrote in her book The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. “But when they intentionally, maliciously and constantly belie the record and bolster up these
...more
