Southern Horrors

Southern Horrors (1892) is a pamphlet by Ida B. Wells. Published several months after a white mob destroyed the office of her prominent Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech, Southern Horrors is an impassioned work of investigative journalism and political criticism from a leading activist of the nineteenth century. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” After publishing these words in a May 1892 edition of the Memphis Free Speech, Ida B. Wells left for a brief vacation in New York―no doubt inspired by the numerous threats made against her life at the time. In her absence, a mob of white men destroyed the newspaper’s office, leaving no trace of her extensive research on the last half century of violence perpetrated against African Americans in the name of white supremacy. Undeterred, Wells published Southern Horrors just months later, combining personal reflections on the incident with daring investigative reporting on the widespread practice of lynching in the American South.

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Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was an African American investigative journalist and civil rights activist. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells was freed with her family following the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Having lost both parents to the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, she moved with her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee to work as a teacher. As co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, Wells gained a reputation for her powerful reports on lynching and racial segregation. In 1892, a white mob attacked the newspaper’s office, destroying the building and everything inside. Undeterred, she continued documenting the widespread practice of lynching in the American South, publishing her pamphlet Southern Horrors later that same year. In 1895, Wells published The Red Record, a more extensive account of the history of lynching and the lives of Black Americans in the South in the years following emancipation. Wells married attorney Ferdinand L. Barrett in Chicago in June 1895, having worked alongside him for several years as editor of pioneering Black newspaper The Chicago Conservator. Together, they raised two children from Barnett’s previous marriage and four children of their own, adding motherhood to Wells’ extensive responsibilities. This inspired her to establish Chicago’s first kindergarten for Black children at the Bethel AME Church. She worked tirelessly as an organizer and activist throughout her life, often disagreeing with such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, who initially excluded her from the list of the NAACP’s founders.