Ida B Wells The Red Record Essay

Although the Civil War ended in 1865, racist, white supremacist terrors reverberated throughout the United States of America. When Reconstruction–the post-Civil War effort to restore the Union in America–came to its close in 1877, these terrors and tragedies increasingly ensued, so much so that the post-Reconstruction time period retains the title of the Nadir (lowest point) of race relations. Due to this rise in white supremacy in the United States, activist Ida B. Wells writes The Red Record, illuminating the horrors of the post-Reconstruction era in the United States. During the Nadir of race relations, graphic, horrific violence coursed through America. Whites carried out lynching against Blacks–violent spectacles which created a carnival-like

It became an accepted part of culture (Lecture March 22). However, this cultural acceptance of lynching is brought to question by Ida B. Wells, who wrote within The Red Record in 1895. Originally published by, Ida B. Wells appealed to the politics of respectability in order to achieve White approval–a strategy common to Black individuals at this time. However, her efforts embark on a different route after she witnesses the lynching of her friends. Friends that were not criminals nor rapists, but instead were successful Black individuals, murdered solely because whites desired to purloin their success. Witnessing this violence firsthand, Wells challenges the controlling stereotype that Black men are brutes who seek to rape white women, and instead states the claim, “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lies that black men rape white women” (Wells). As previously mentioned, lynching was justified on claims of sexual assault, on claims that Black men consistently rape white women. Because Black men were painted to be rapists targeting white women, their vicious murders were justified in society and largely ignored by the legal