Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases

On October 5, 1892, the journalist Ida B. Wells delivered a powerful and incisive denunciation of lynching to a room of prominent African American women in New York City’s Lyric Hall. Wells had spent months investigating the systematic torture and murder of Black Americans in the South. Her reporting, published in the Memphis newspaper she co-owned, showed that Black men were lynched not for alleged assaults on white women, but for registering to vote or failing to show deference to white Southerners. After a white mob burned down her newspaper office, Wells moved North and joined an intellectual community of Black women educators, activists, and journalists in Brooklyn and New York City. Her groundbreaking speech to those supporters led to the publication of Southern Horrors only a few weeks later.