“Southern Horrors:” in Context
A dialog between Ms. Ida B. Wells and Dr. Manisha Sinha as Wells writes a Southern Horrors editorial
This video is a thumbnail sketch of a dramatization we plan to film this spring. In it, Ida B. Wells reads as she writes an editorial that will become part of “Southern Horrors,” a booklet of editorials she produced about lynchings in the late 19th century South. Dr. Manisha Sinha ping-pong back and forth with Ms. Wells, explaining the historical events and context of Wells’ words. In the video, Ida Wells is played by a photo, typewriter graphics, and an AI-generated southern woman’s voice. In real life, she will be played by Ms. Effie Mwando of Our Culture is Beautiful. Dr. Sinha was filmed at the John brown farm in North Elba, NY.
Dr. Manisha Sinha: “Ida B. Wells was a newspaper editor in Memphis, Tennessee. She was a black woman, and she edited her own newspaper. She was a child of Reconstruction. Her father was prominent in the Union Leagues in the South. She herself had been educated in Friedman Schools and became a school teacher before she was an editor.
And what happened was that her friends, who actually had a grocery business in Memphis, they are lynched. So, she wrote an editorial condemning this. Wednesday evening, May 24th, 1892. The city of Memphis was filled with excitement. Editorials in the daily papers of that date caused a meeting to be held in the Cotton Exchange Building.
Ida Wells: “A committee was sent for the editors of the Free Speech and Afro American Journal published in that city, and the only reason the open threats of lynching that were made were not carried out Was because the editors could not be found, and then of course she had to flee Memphis. The cause of all this commotion was the following editorial published in the free speech May 21st, 1892, the Saturday previous.
Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the free speech. One at Little Rock, Arkansas, last Saturday morning, where the citizens broke into the penitentiary and got their man. “
Dr. Sinha: “And she ends up writing pamphlets against lynching and starting her famous anti-lynching crusade. Uh, in the 1890s, and she's supported by a black newspaper editor in New York called T. Thomas Fortune, who publishes a New York newspaper, and she starts writing for him, uh, against lynching, and this becomes the basis of her pamphlets against lynching, first Southern Horrors, and then the second one was called Red Record.
“Three near Anniston, Alabama, one near New Orleans. And three at Clarksville, Georgia, the last three for killing a white man, and five on the same old racket, the new alarm about raping white women.
Dr. Sinha: “And the excuses, of course, that they were suspected of raping or sexually assaulting white women. And Ida B. Wells knew this to be a complete canard. A complete falsehood because she knew these men. She knew that they were lynched because they were successful businessmen. Uh, and the white political and economic elite in Memphis, Tennessee, simply wanted to get rid of them.”
The same program of hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies. was carried out to the letter.
Dr. Sinha: “This disrespect shown towards black people, uh, was something that goes right back to the era of slavery. Uh, black bodies being whipped regularly, being hanged, uh, for suspected disobedience. You go back to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and you look at the way they desecrated the bodies of his black compatriots.
They even dissected them. The Winchester Medical College in Virginia, uh, disrespected these bodies, dissected these bodies. The Union Army, by the way, when they landed in Virginia, burnt down the Winchester Medical College that had actually desecrated the bodies of John Brown's black allies at Harpers Ferry.
So this is an old tradition. But what happens during Reconstruction, which is the period immediately following the Civil War, is that suddenly African Americans get citizenship rights. They get civil and political rights. And for most Southerners, especially former Confederates, the idea of having African Americans as equal citizens in the Republic was just unimaginable.”
And they begin this sort of brutal campaign of racist terror against freed people.
Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bear 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.
Dr. Sinha: “What's interesting about Ida B. Wells is she's doing something that African American women, beginning with Harriet Jacobs, who was one of the first women to write a slave narrative. She published her narrative called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1860, where she talked about this. Where she talked about this; women being forced to suffer sexual abuse. Now, in Victorian America, no one talked about this openly. No woman would say this because women were supposed to, by the Victorian notions of gender, supposed to be, you know, genteel and virtuous and pure. But enslaved women never hesitated in their narratives to point out this double standard.
So when Ida B. Wells started writing against lynching and talking about the myth about white women being assaulted by black men and the assaults on black women that had been committed and that went unpunished, she was going back to this old tradition of African American women not hesitating. Uh, even though they might use, you know, polite Victorian gendered language, they were still talking about something that was not supposed to be done openly.”
The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish lynchings of Afro Americans which have recently taken place and was meant as a warning. Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape. The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery.
And the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war. When the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race, which is all at once charged with being a bestial one. Since my business has been destroyed and I am in exile from home because of that editorial, the issue has been forced.
And as the writer of it, I feel that the race in the public generally should have a statement of the facts as they exist. They will serve at the same time as a defense for the Afro-American Samsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilas. But we do know that rape was an instrument of political violence against Black women, just as lynching was.
Dr. Sinha: “And there were many instances, um, that we know of, of the rape and assault of Black women. We can see that in the Freedmen's Bureau records, which was a federal government agency overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom after the Civil War. Um, you can see them in congressional records, uh, of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, where black women came forward and gave testimony at times of being abused or assaulted.
So we know that this did happen in the South. “
“The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races. They leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can. But it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women.
White men lynch the offending Afro American not because he is a death spoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women. “
Dr. Sinha: “And so today, when, you know, in the generation of Me Too, you can go back to these same narratives. My, my students read them, and they're sort of astounded that these women were so brave that already the 1850s and 1890s, they are writing about this and, and they are claiming that, you know, there should be some justice, some accounting for this.”
