Author Description

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases is a brilliant pamphlet by Ida B. Wells, written based on the writer’s own experiences (three of her friends were lynched in a conflict) as well as on her thorough and in-depth research about the topic. Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi just a few months before slavery was abolished in 1862. After her parents and one of her siblings died of yellow fever, she decided to try and keep her remaining family together and she found work as a teacher, job that allowed her to support her six siblings. In 1884, she did what made her infamous in her time and well-known and respected today: she refused to give up her first-class ladies seat in a train and to move to the already overcrowded smoking car, being dragged out of her seat. When she returned to Memphis, she hired an African-American lawyer and filed a law suit against the railroad company and she also made the incident public, writing an incendiary article about it in The Living Way. She won the case and was awarded a 500-dollar compensation by the court. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases is among the best examples of investigative journalism ever. She researched the topic for a long time before writing the pamphlet and her findings were truly shocking for the audience: the claim that it was the crimes of rape and abuse committed by black people against white women was unfounded and lynching was in fact a form and a tool of controlling Afro-American communities. The style of the pamphlet is elevated, the argumentation is clear and well-founded, making it one of the most important social studies of the era and an amazing and passionate study carried out by one of the most important Afro-American political and social activists of all times.