Summary: The Anti-Lynching Campaign Of Ida B. Wells

Consider every history course you have ever taken throughout your life. We have all heard and read, time and again, of the tales of the past that often relate the barbaric tendencies of humanity. All through the ages, from the rise of the Romans to this very day in the “modern” era, what is one recurring theme amongst man’s collective history? One answer is that, without fail, people have always managed to find differences worth alienating one another over. In the United States, that difference has often revolved around race. We Americans share the burden of a past checkered by a vicious, poisonous, racial prejudice that promoted slavery over a hundred years ago, yet still hinders the progress of our society. This obstacle, however, is nothing new, as evidenced by Jacqueline Jones Royster in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B.

Royster informs her readers of the stance Ida B. Wells took against the unlawful lynching (violent execution) of African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction era South, and the sordid details of this constituent of history. According to the novel, lynching was an expedient form of frontier justice popular in the South, and African-Americans were often the victims of such a practice. Many southerners justified lynching as a method of punishment for black men who raped white women. However, Wells’ analyses of several recorded lynchings prove that there are glaring inconsistencies surrounding this reasoning. The unfortunate truth is that white Southerners used a multitude of perceived and alleged offenses like rape to justify lynching African-Americans, who, in reality, were the targets for intimidation and oppression in the post-Civil War