America Awakened

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Description

A classic of investigative journalism, the pamphlets of Ida B. Wells-Barnett shine a light on the evils of racism in the United States. With a contextual introduction and useful footnotes, this book gives students an opportunity to analyze and interpret primary texts. The book includes the full text of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases; The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States; and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, and Other Lynching Statistics.

Sujets

• Violence in Society
• Ethnic Studies
• Civil Rights
• Essays
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• América
• Jim Crow laws
• Civil and political rights
• African American
• American
• Jim Crow
• Black

Informations

• Publié par: Chemeketa Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781943536771
• Langue: English

Extrait

America Awakened
Primary Text Editions
Student Editions of Historical Texts

Portrait of Ida B. Wells-Barnett by Mary Garrity, ca. 1893.
America Awakened
The Anti-Lynching Crusade of Ida B. Wells-Barnett
by Ida B. Wells-Barnett
edited and introduced by Taylor A. Marrow III
America Awakened: The Anti-Lynching Crusade of Ida B. Wells-Barnett
ISBN: 978-1-943536-68-9
2020 by Chemeketa Community College. All rights reserved.
Introduction 2020 by Taylor A. Marrow III. Used by permission.
Chemeketa Press is a nonprofit publishing endeavor at Chemeketa Community College that works with faculty, staff, and students to create affordable and effective alternatives to commercial textbooks. All proceeds from the sales of this textbook go toward the development of new textbooks.
To learn more, visit www.chemeketapress.org .
Publisher : David Hallett
Director : Abbey Gaterud
Managing Editor : Brian Mosher
Instructional Editor : Stephanie Lenox
Editorial Assistant : Taylor Wynia
Design Editor : Ronald Cox IV
Interior Design : Ronald Cox IV
The text for Southern Horrors comes from the original 1892 pamphlet produced by the New York Age. The text for The Red Record comes from the original 1895 pamphlet. The text for Mob Rule in New Orleans comes from the original 1900 pamphlet. All pamphlets have been subsequently reprinted, so it is not clear whether curiosities in spelling date back to the originals or were introduced later. Editors for this edition have elected to make certain silent corrections for the sake of readability. This includes modernizing and standardizing hyphenation, diacritical marks, and capitalization where it impacts clarity or internal consistency. For example, Negro has been capitalized and anti-lynching has been hyphenated throughout. Likewise, obvious spelling or typographical errors have been corrected silently, as in the spelling of miscegenation or the biblical character of Samson. Parenthetical question marks that were included in the original text were also removed. Other idiosyncrasies of spelling have been generally persevered with the addition of brackets or footnotes to increase accessibility for the student reader.
Printed in the United States of America.
This book is dedicated to my mother Karen J. Marrow, my wife Elizabeth Zapel, and my two children Enias and Weston. I would not be in this position in my life without the support, love and compassion from family. It is my hope that the people who read the words of Ida B. Wells-Barnett will develop more empathy, compassion and understanding of the Black experience in the United States, and that they will be compelled to take action to improve the world.
-Taylor A. Marrow III
The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.
-Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Contents
Editor s Introduction
Southern Horrors
Preface
Dedication
Hon. Fred. Douglass s Letter
1. The Offense
2. The Black and White of It
3. The New Cry
4. The Malicious and Untruthful White Press
5. The South s Position
6. Self-Help
The Red Record
Hon. Frederick Douglass s Letter
1. The Case Stated
2. Lynch-Law Statistics
3. Lynching Imbeciles
4. Lynching of Innocent Men
5. Lynched for Anything or Nothing
6. History of Some Cases of Rape
7. The Crusade Justified
8. Miss Willard s Attitude
9. Lynching Record for 1894
10. The Remedy
Mob Rule in New Orleans
Introduction
1. Shot an Officer
2. Death of Charles
3. Mob Brutality
4. Insolent Blacks
5. Shocking Brutality
6. Murder on the Levee
7. A Victim in the Market
8. A Gray-Haired Victim
9. Fun in Gretna
10. Brutality in New Orleans
11. Was Charles a Desperado?
12. Died in Self-Defense
13. Burning Human Beings Alive
14. Lynching Record
Glossary Index
Editor s Introduction
Lynch Law has become so common in the United States that the finding of the dead body of a Negro, suspended between heaven and earth to the limb of a tree, is of so slight importance that neither the civil authorities nor press agencies consider the matter worth investigating.
-from The Red Record (1895) by Ida B. Wells-Barnett
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ida B. Wells-Barnett embarked on a crusade to reveal the stark reality of racial injustice in the United States. Her activism, radicalism, and willingness to confront racism during a time when women were restricted from public life and African Americans were viewed as inferior set her apart from more commonly known activists such as Rosa Parks. The legacy of activism and social justice of Wells-Barnett s anti-lynching crusade laid the foundation for the mass civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1892, Wells-Barnett published her first pamphlet investigating lynching entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases and published two more pamphlets on the subject: The Red Record (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). These pamphlets were first published in the period that became known as the nadir of race relations (1890-1920), referring to the darkest days (or lowest point) of racism, anti-Black violence, and hostility following the American Civil War.
In these three journalistic pamphlets, Wells-Barnett provides details, data, and analysis of the causes of lynching in America. She presents graphic descriptions from editorials and firsthand accounts of extralegal (outside the law) violence including riots, mutilations, shootings, hangings, and burnings. What s more, Wells-Barnett dissects the justifications for lynching including accusations of rape. With this scrutiny, she steps out of the traditional role of the Black female by discussing the reality of consensual sex between a Black male and white female. Wells-Barnett s lifelong campaign against lynching exposed the fallacy of rape as the justification for lynching and revolutionized the way Americans talk about violence against African Americans. Together, these three pamphlets show the destructive and brutal nature of white racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Wells-Barnett was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. Like all slaves, Wells-Barnett was considered property. Many Southern states made it illegal to educate a slave because an educated slave was unrulier, more recalcitrant, and ambitious. Most importantly, her fate, including whom she married, where she lived, how she cared for her children, and what type of labor she performed, could be determined by her owner. Nonetheless, the year of her birth was pivotal in the American Civil War and African American progress. In the winter of 1862, Ulysses S. Grant emerged as the commanding general for the Union Army of the North, and by the summer of 1862 he led federal troops to turn the tide against the Southern Confederacy. Moreover, in September of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that took effect January 1, 1863, which freed some slaves (those in the Confederacy) and led to the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery throughout the United States in 1865.
By the time of Wells-Barnett s eighth birthday in 1870, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments made Blacks citizens and provided them voting rights and protections. To be sure, emancipation opened a world of unprecedented opportunity for Southern Blacks, but the violence and structures of racism were ever-present. By the late 1870s, Blacks lived in a society where racism was legal and included segregated train cars, theaters, bathrooms, and other public places of accommodation. It was routine for white men to demean and beat Blacks in public for violating written and unwritten social codes, such as talking back. Furthermore, an all-white jury was common in legal proceedings, and Blacks were limited in their testimony against white offenders.
In spite of these ongoing struggles for equality, one of the biggest opportunities that Wells-Barnett gained after emancipation was access to education. At the conclusion of the American Civil War, the federal government immediately implemented plans to reintegrate Southern states back into the Union and reconstruct the shattered South. Reconstruction (1865-1877) brought Southern states back into the Union, provided legal rights for Blacks, and attempted to rebuild industry and infrastructure. White Northerners, including reform-minded religious groups such as the Quakers and former abolitionists, journeyed to the South to educate recently freed slaves. Unlike the opportunistic Northern carpetbaggers who descended on the South to profit from Reconstruction, these groups did not venture south to exploit and seek riches. White Northerners and Southern Blacks faced hostile conditions during Reconstruction. In spite of the dangerous conditions, and with the help of community leaders and churches, many schools were constructed in the region with the intent to uplift Blacks out of poverty. Wells-Barnett attended one such school, Rust College, founded in Holly Springs in 1866. Wells-Barnett and members of her community had to navigate a violent backlash of white supremacy including tarring and feathering (a form of public humiliation and torture involving pouring hot wood tar on someone s skin and then coating it with feathers), political assassinations, and organized terrorism.
The most notorious terrorist group during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 and still exists today. Their name derives from the Greek word Kuklos (circle) and the English word clan, referring to a family or group of like-minded individuals. Members of the Klan are white supremacists who use violence and terror to enforce white power. The Reconstruction-era Klan lasted until the 1870s and its purpose was to impose white rule in the South by any means necessary. Thousands of men joined the KKK during Reconstruction, and it took federal legislation known as th