Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws In All Its Phases By Ida B. Wells

Wells & Tillman Analysis African Americans have been and still are subjected to centuries of mistreatment, from forced slavery and being treated as animals, to lynchings and segregation. While blacks were finally free and granted some rights, many citizens and especially politicians, mostly in the South, have done anything and everything to make black lives hell while trying to hide the racism with loopholes. Ida B. Wells wrote a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws In All Its Phases, which covers several lynchings in the year of 1892 and how whites celebrated them and made excuses to justify them. One of the politicians mentioned by Wells was Senator Tillman of South Carolina, who himself gave a speech in 1900 regarding the lynchings

One example of this can be found in the section labeled The Offense: “Eight negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech one at Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday morning– the new alarm about raping white women. The same programme of hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter.”1 In this specific part, whites justify their lynching and needless mutilation of corpses with the preface that [the negroes] rape their women. Wells states that no one in her section of the country believes this lie, and that if Southern whites use this extensively, they will eventually be caught in their own lie and ruin the moral reputation of their wives. Additionally, a specific citation made within the pamphlet itself

In his own words, “. . . And he [Senator John C. Spooner, of Wisconsin] said we had taken their rights away from them. He asked me was it right to murder them in order to carry out elections– it was the riots before the elections precipitated by their own hot-headedness in attempting to hold the government, that brought on conflicts between races and caused the shotgun to be used. That is what I meant by we used the shotgun.”3 By claiming that it was the fault of the blacks for the violence and lynchings against them, he tried to discredit Senator Spooner’s claims that [the state of South Carolina] was taking away the rights of blacks. In addition to those claims, Tillman went on to say that “–it was because of the Republicans of that day, led by Thad Stevens, wanted to put white necks under black heels and to get revenge.”4 With this, it furthered his earlier claim of “the black man’s own hotheadedness,” and therefore furthering his justification towards lynching blacks. In his own way, he was justifying white supremacy and lynching blacks as a form of defense against the Republicans’ push to “put white necks under black heels.” As a result, he goes on to state the following, “We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit