Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism

Abstract

Although Ida B. Wells was already an accomplished and noteworthy civil rights activist and journalist in 1892, the lynching of three African American businessmen in her hometown of Memphis that year changed her political life. Her protest of the lynchings and her challenge to the justifications offered for mob violence forced her into exile in the North and spurred her decision to bring her antilynching campaign to Britain. Sarah L. Silkey offers a focused examination of the effect of Wells's turn-of-the-century antilynching work on British public opinion and political reform and the resulting U.S. response to changing British attitudes. While the British accepted the “frontier justice” explanation for the presence of lynching in the mid-nineteenth-century American West, news of late nineteenth-century American lynchings raised British suspicions. Silkey's book shows how Wells, through tireless work and astute assessment of the political, economic, and social landscapes of the United States and Britain, shifted the transatlantic “exchange of ideas” about lynching. Through two speaking tours Wells transformed British attitudes from tacit acceptance of the “lynch for rape” narrative to endorsement of Wells's “interpretation of lynching as a racist act of violent oppression” (p. 5).