Ida B. Wells lifts her voice to expose
the terrors of the lynch era atrocities

How Ida Wells began her crusade for justice (anti-lynching)

Such relationships between white men and colored women were notorious, and had been as long as the two races had lived together in the South. This was so much a fact that such unions had bleached a large percentage of the Negro race, and filled it with the offspring of such unions. These children were and are known as mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. [Crusade for Justice, p 69]

Many stories of the antebellum South were based upon such relationships. It has frequently been charged in narratives of slave times that these white fathers and masters brought their mulatto and quadroon children to the North and gave them freedom and established homes for them, thus making them independent.

All my life I have known that such conditions were accepted as a matter of course. I found that this rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without let or hindrance, check or reproof from church, state or press until there had been created this race within a race -- and all designated by the inclusive term of "colored." [Crusade for Justice, p 70]

I also found that what the white man of the South practiced as all right for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white woman. White men could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroom girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men. Whenever they did so and were found out, the cry of rape was raised, and the lowest element of the white South was turned loose to wreak its fiendish cruelty on those too weak to help themselves.

No torture of helpless victims by heathen savages or cruel red Indians ever exceeded the cold-blooded savagery of white devils under lynch law. None of the hideous murders by butchers of Nero to make a Roman holiday exceeded these burnings alive of black human beings. This was done by white men who controlled all the forces of law and order in their communities and who could have easily chosen to LEGALLY punish any rapists and murderers, especially black men who had neither political power nor financial strength with which to evade any justly deserved fate.

The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income. The federal laws for Negro protection passed during Reconstruction times [even the 14th & 15th Amendments] had been made a mockery by the white South where it had not secured their repeal. This same white South had secured political control of its several states, and as soon as white southerners came into power they began to make playthings of Negro lives and property. This still seemed not enough to "keep the nigger down."

Hence came lynch law to stifle Negro manhood which defended itself, and the burning alive of Negroes who were weak enough to accept favors from white women. The many unspeakable and unprintable tortures to which Negro rapists (?) of white women were subjected were for the purpose of striking terror into the hearts of other Negroes who might be thinking of consorting with white women. [Crusade for Justice, p 71]

I found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities to the world, the Negro was being branded as a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women. I found that white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so wherever they could, these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women; even when the white women were willing victims.

It seemed horrible to me that death in its most terrible form should be meted out to the Negro who was weak enough to take chances when accepting the invitations of these white women; but that the entire race should be branded as moral monsters and despoilers of white womanhood and childhood was bound to rob us of all the friends we had and silence any protests that they might make for us.

For all these reasons it seemed a stern duty to give the facts I had collected to the world.

Phyllis Chesler, commenting on Paul Cadmus drawing (To the Lynching) writes: The political and spiritual dismemberment of dark men: their capture, the sale, the betrayal of dark-skinned men by other dark-skinned men -- who bore their African captives into slavery in Catholic Europe, in Catholic-European South America, in Moslem Asia, in the Protestant United States. The madness of slavery captured in one explosive image: the lynching, the torture, the castration, the hanging of black men by white men; the "strange fruit" on Southern trees.

Helene Deutsch in Psychology of Women reports on the Rape Complex of many white women. Though her views were sharply questioned in later years (by Susan Brownmiller and many others), they seem to make a point. Deutsch writes: "Rape fantasies have such irresistible verisimilitude that even the most experienced judges are misled in trials of innocent [Black] men accused of rape by hysterical women. My own experience of accounts by white women of rape by Negroes (who are often subjected to terrible penalties as a result of these accusations) has convinced me that many fantastic stories are produced by the masochistic yearnings of these women. [Brownmiller, pp 229-230]

Black Man Crucified

Crime Against Humanity

Christ Crucified

America's great crime against humanity

Besides the Ku Klux Klan (date normally regarded as the inception, December 24, 1865, Pulaski, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, Nathan Bedford Forrest assumed the leadership. Other secret orders that arose during that period were Knights of the White Camelia (Louisiana), the White Brotherhood (Mississippi), the Knights of the White Rose, the Pale Faces, the Union Guard and the White League.

maledictus omnis qui pendet in ligno

Galatians 3:13 - cursed is he who is hanged on a tree