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Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism
The cover page for A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 by Ida B. Wells.

The cover page for A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 by Ida B. Wells.

In A Red Record, Ida B. Wells exposed the practice of lynching as a tactic designed to maintain white supremacy and limit African American opportunities for economic, social, and political power. Wells addressed and dismantled white southerners’ typical justifications for lynching, which included the alleged threats of “race riots,” the chaos that would result from “Negro rule” should African Americans be allowed to exercise their fifteenth amendment right to vote, and black criminality, specifically the rape of white women. In A Red Record, Wells collected and published the newspaper accounts of hundreds of lynchings of African Americans across the southern states for the years 1892, 1893, and 1894 along with their alleged crimes. Wells expands on the raw statistics with accounts of specific incidents in which legal due process was denied, families and individuals were targeted arbitrarily, and innocent people were killed.

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Citation Information
Wells-Barnett, Ida B., “A red record. Tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894,” Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/item/6ca2d0601d7960e03d25724ceeabd441.
Note: These citations are programmatically generated and may be incomplete.
Courtesy of The New York Public Library.

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  • the author's point of view
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Item 4 of 13 in the Primary Source Set Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism

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A legal brief for Ida B. Wells’ lawsuit against Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad Company before the state Supreme Court, 1885.
A portrait of Ida B. Wells, ca. 1893.
The cover page for Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases (1892), the first pamphlet by Ida B. Wells dedicated to exposing lynching.
The cover page for A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 by Ida B. Wells.
An illustration with portraits of African American leaders, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ca. 1900.
A political cartoon by Thomas Nast titled “The Union as it Was,” published in Harper’s Weekly October 24, 1874.
Lynching announcements from New Orleans States and Jackson Daily News reproduced in The Crisis, August 1919.
(Warning: graphic material) A photograph showing the aftermath of a public lynching in Columbus, Georgia, June 1, 1896.
An address about Ida B. Wells’ speaking tour in England, adopted by a group of African American citizens in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1894.
A letter from A. M. Middlebrook to Albion Tourgée about a lynching to be held in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Sept. 28, 1894.
A letter from Ida B. Wells to Albion Tourgée, Nov. 27, 1894.
A portrait of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1920s.
The introduction to The Tragedy of Lynching, produced by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1933.

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