Pamphlet published titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

Southern Horrors and The Red Record

Cover of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

 

 

On October 26, 1892, Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.^[26][27] 

 Having examined many accounts of lynchings due to the alleged "rape of white women", she concluded that Southerners cried rape as an excuse to hide their real reasons for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened white Southerners with competition, and white ideas of enforcing black second-class status in the society.

 Black economic progress was a contemporary issue in the South, and in many states whites worked to suppress black progress. 

In this period at the turn of the century, Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed laws and/or new constitutions to disenfranchise most black people and many poor white people through use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other devices.

 Wells-Barnett recommended that black people use arms to defend against lynching.^[28]