Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

Ida B. Wells was already an accomplished journalist and dedicated activist when the March 1892 lynching of one of her friends in her hometown of Memphis compelled her to take action and begin speaking out against the barbaric practice, which was at that time prevalent across the American South. Employed as editor of the Free Speech, Memphis’s Black newsletter, Wells wrote about the shocking lack of attention and intervention on the part of law enforcement and repudiated the idea that lynchings were solely a response to accusations of rape. The myth of the Black male rapist, who presented a constant and significant threat to white women’s proposed innocence and purity, permeated the American South following the Civil War, reaching its peak in the 1880s. Although regionally they did not engage in the same levels of violence against Black men, Northern white people had come to believe in the myth as well. Wells argued in her publications that lynching was a prime example of the barbarism of which Black men were often accused, and it was the white male participants who were in fact the barbarians for the cruelty they demonstrated in executing others without trial. She focused on dispelling the myth of the Black male rapist and on bringing the attention of the public to the fact that many Black men were lynched on suspicion of other crimes, not sexual assault.