Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Southern Horrors and Other Writings 1892-1900. - Wells primarly uses pathos and logos to rhetoricize her arguments in Southern Horrors and Other Writings, a collection of several anti-lynching campaign pamphlets authored by Wells from 1892-1900. One of the primary arguments involves the complicity of white women in 19th c. Southern interracial "liasons." Wells skillfully weaves the experiences and domination of Southern white patriarchal structure with those of its subservients, the black man, the black woman, and the white woman. She deconstructs the manipulative, brainwashing technique of the patriarchal rhetoric through the "white press": "The 'Southern barbarism' which deserves the serious attention of all people North and South, is the barbarism which preys upon weak and defenseless women. Nothing but the most prompt, speedy and extreme punishment can hold in check the horrible and beastial (sic.) propensities of the Negro race.. . . In each case the crime was deliberately planned and perpetrated by several Negroes. They watched for an opportunity when the women were left without a protector" (62). The women are indeed "defenseless" in the eyes of Southern men, objectified, possessed and demeaned by the white patriarchy, which deems to create social constructs of race and sex in order to divide, to create the Other, to maintain power. Wells is not concerned only for the thousands of Afro-American lives lost to lynching--she argues against the self-deicizing white male force over all.

Joy James creates the symbolic schematic for this manipulation, where the WASPS manipulate the societal metaphor, the "White code of chialry, a deadly duet played in bi-polar stereotypes of White 'knights' and 'ladies'; Black 'sexual savages' and 'whores' (the stereotype of the hypersexual Black female). A White man--by definition a 'gentleman' in comparison to African-Americans--would not rape a 'lady' (White woman) and could not rape a sexual object (Black woman)" ("The Anti-Violence Legacy of an 'Ancestor Mother': Ida B. Wells-Barnett", Community Times, Feb. 95, 8). But Wells manipulates Reverend King's, a witness to the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, recall of the event to create a role reversal, where the "20,000 maddened people took up the ictim's cry of agony and a prolonged howl of maddened glee rent the air.. . . so anxious were the savages to participate in the sickening tortures" (97). She creates a role reversal, turning the stereotype on its head, citing Reverend King's recognition of "children of my own race follow the unfortunate man and taunt him with jeers." Like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Wells' chosen rhetoric conveys a community complicit in their own peoples' subjugation.

Utilizing double-meanings within her words, Wells cites the "outraging of a white woman by a Negro" as representative of the "race question in the ugliest, vilest, most dangerous aspect" (emphasis added. 63). Here, the term dangerous becomes a signifier of the threat of black men possession of white woman to the white man's power. Wells also questions the Southern White man's religious hypocrisy, claiming Christianity, a New Testament faith based on love, tolerance, and abandonment of worldly possessions, but practicing murder for the sheer sake of control, violence, and spectatorship. Her repetitive (ad nauseum!) pamphlets question the manipulation of the Southern White man's religion to suit his own needs. Her texts become a caustic "book of martyrs," where the victims are matyrs not for Christianity but for Southern "Christian" inhumanity. She appeals to the lynchings of "imbeciles," a debate still alive on the death penalty circuit today. Her illustrations force the reader to visualize (and contextualize) her verbal rhetoric, especially in the crucifix-reminiscent lynching of C.J. Miller by chain, as opposed to rope, the "white man's death" (105).

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One of my favorite songs is "Strange Fruit", especiallly when it's Billie Holiday, several years before her death, clearing her throat against the mike and dropping almost into a bass to reach the sinking notes of Abel Meeropol's lyrics of metaphorical massacre. Although she sang the song nearly one-half century after the work of Wells-Barnett, there is a fierce connection, an image that gives her campaign a visual medium.

When one of her friends, a store owner, was lynched in Memphis in 1892, Wells-Barnett lashed out by penning a tirade against lynching and encouraging her fellow black men to "go west" in her newspaper "The Free Speech and Headlight." Because of danger to her life, she was forced to leave Memphis (on death threats), and turned to England, where she orated. The website for "African-American Perspectives: The Progress of a People" offers a pamphlet, read by Wells-Barnett in Real Audio, which denounces what amounted to a lynching of 2,522 African Americans (50 of which were women) between 1889 and 1918 (and which persisted strongly after her death in 1931):

During six weeks of the months of March and April just past, twelve colored men were lynched in Georgia, the reign of outlawry culminating in the torture and hanging of the colored preacher, Elijah Strickland, and the burning alive of Samuel Wilkes, alias Hose, Sunday, April 23, 1899.

The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist. (Wells-Barnett)

There are more than a multitude of websites dedicated to Wells-Barnett, which offer various strains of her biography and a link to her bibliography (there is even a play by Mary Satchell). Amazon.com was also a help in dredging up some of the texts that Purdue's library does not possess. The Purdue library catalog contains several works on and by Wells-Barnett, including On Lynchings, for which Patricia Hill Collins penned the introduction. Also, Pinkney's text on Black Women Freedom Fighters should make for an interesting read; althought it is a children's text, Pinkney combines history as well as oral traition to account for the tales she brings to the surface. Purdue's online databases have offered a variety of historical interpretations of her life and work (and book reviews of those who've interpreted hers) for me to peruse.

Sources

"African-American Perspectives: The Progress of a People." Accessed January 16, 2004. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aapmob.html.

Brown, Mary Jane. "Advocates in the Age of Jazz: Women and the Campaign for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill." Peace & Change 28:3 (July 2003): 378-419. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Accessed January 16, 2005.  http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&an=10051364.

McMurry, Linda O. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Paisley, Harris. "Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African-American Women's History and Black Feminism." Journal of Women's History 15:1 (Spring 2003): 212-20. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. Accessed January 16, 2005.  http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&an=9644811

Pinkney, Andrea Davis. Let it Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters. San Diego: Harcourt, 2000.

Schechter, Patricia Ann. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. Chapell Hill: North Carolina UP, 2001.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Negro American Biographies and Autobiographes. Ed. Alfreda M. Duster.  Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.

---.On Lynchings. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002.

---. Southern Horrors and other writings: the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.