Showing results by author "Ida B. Wells-Barnett" in All Categories

Mob Rule in New Orleans is Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s searing investigative account of the 1900 lynching of Robert Charles and the violent wave of racial terror that swept across New Orleans in its aftermath. With unflinching clarity and journalistic precision, Wells exposes how police brutality, white mob violence, and institutional complicity united to create a deadly storm targeting the Black community.

On a New Orleans morning in 1900, a young Black man named Robert Charles dared to fight back after an unprovoked assault by three white officers. The officers had first approached Charles on the grounds that he looked “suspicious” in a predominantly white neighborhood, and began to attack him after he stood up. After shots were fired, Charles fled on foot, and legal sanction was granted to anyone who sought to kill the “desperado” (as the white newspapers of the time quickly labeled him). In the days that followed, riotous mobs overtook New Orleans.

In the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, crusading African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett bravely reported on the scourge of white supremacist violence that had personally impacted her own life and work. Her reporting exposed and riled the South, enlightened uninformed Northerners, and captured international attention. Southern Horrors and The Red Record offer extensive accounts of the lynching, cruelty, and hate that African Americans faced in the early years of the Jim Crow South.

In 1892, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett published a pamphlet with unflinching and honest descriptions of the cruelties being enacted against Black Americans in the South by their White neighbors. Wells’ poignant and raw reporting of the horrors of lynching scandalized many of her readers outside the South, yet the practice continued unimpeded for more than half a century after. Today, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases is a sobering reminder that American racism and inequality did not simply end with emancipation.

The Red Record presents an unflinching examination of lynching in the United States; an account not crafted by the oppressed, but rather, an indictment sourced from the very mouths of the oppressors. For years, the Chicago Tribune, a leading American journal, has been meticulously compiling lynching statistics. The data presented in this podcast, undisputed since its first publication in 1894, is based solely on the Tribunes findings, to guard against any accusations of exaggeration. Listen in as we delve into a sobering chapter of American history.