The Red Record (1895), a 100-page pamphlet describing lynching in the United States

 

 Ida Bell Wells-Barnett 

(July 16, 1864 – March 25, 1931

She followed-up with greater research and detail in The Red Record (1895), a 100-page pamphlet describing lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

 It also covered black peoples' struggles in the South since the Civil War. The Red Record explored the alarmingly high rates of lynching in the United States (which was at a peak from 1880 to 1930). 

Wells-Barnett said that during Reconstruction, most Americans outside the South did not realize the growing rate of violence against black people in the South. 

She believed that during slavery, white people had not committed as many attacks because of the economic labor value of slaves. 

Wells noted that, since slavery time, "ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, [through lynching] without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution." 

Frederick Douglass had written an article noting three eras of "Southern barbarism" and the excuses that whites claimed in each period.