I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
IDA B. WELLSThe nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.
More Ida B. Wells Quotes
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The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.
IDA B. WELLS -
There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.
IDA B. WELLS -
The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.
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The appetite grows for what it feeds on.
IDA B. WELLS -
The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased.
IDA B. WELLS -
I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way… so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.
IDA B. WELLS -
In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.
IDA B. WELLS -
Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.
IDA B. WELLS -
No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders
IDA B. WELLS -
In fact, for all kinds of offenses – and, for no offenses – from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.
IDA B. WELLS -
Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.
IDA B. WELLS -
The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.
IDA B. WELLS -
The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way towards proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless,
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I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap.
IDA B. WELLS -
I honestly believe I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches.
IDA B. WELLS -
The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.
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Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place.
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The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.
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The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder.
IDA B. WELLS -
Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.
IDA B. WELLS -
The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.
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The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American.
IDA B. WELLS -
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.
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White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.
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When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.
IDA B. WELLS -
Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.
IDA B. WELLS