Investigating Facts

Abstract

Ida B. Wells, writing twenty-seven years after Mississippi passed legislation¹ that freed her from a perpetual state of bondage, employed journalistic skills to evaluate a moral problem.² Wells’s committed determination to document southern horrors led to her emergence as a leading nineteenth-century anti-lynching advocate. She couched the purpose of her analysis in biblical language. She said that her goal “is not a shield for the de spoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the blind A fro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.”³ Wells did not deny the existence of racially based sexual crimes. She did, however, suggest that some of the charges were deceptive allegations to avoid public disclosure of consensual biracial relationships. Thus, of primary importance to Wells, as she noted in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, was the ability to:

• A. Give the world a true, unvarnished account of the causes of lynch law in the South;

• B. Contribute to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic to demand, that justice be done though the heavens fall;

• C. Accept responsibility for showing that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning;

• D. Contribute toward proving that the A fro-American is not a bestial race.⁴