Ida Wells Barnett
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Ida B. Wells was the most outspoken of African American critics of lynching. Having staked out her position against lynching in her Memphis, Tennessee newspaper, The Free Speech, Wells paid a heavy price for exercising that right. A mob destroyed the paper's office while Wells was out of town, and friends made it clear that it would not be safe for her to return to the city. These events provide the backdrop for Southern Horrors. In this pamphlet, Wells told her own story and drew on numerous other examples related to lynching. She gave the lie to white Southerners who argued that lynching was aimed at providing community retribution for black rapes of white women. What made Wells's writing particularly offensive to whites was her assertion, "that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American's company even as there are white men notorious for their preference to Afro-American women." That interracial sex could be consensual or that white men might be rapists of black women were perspectives that white supremacists could not tolerate.
Wells became a strong defender of black rights generally in this period and was an early founder of the National Association of Colored Women...