Wells, Southern Horrors and Red Record

Wells Description

Wells exposes the machinery of racial terror through journalism.

Wells Quotes

This statement is not a shield for the despoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs. It is a contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic that justice be done though the heavens fall

Significance: To stop falling for white propaganda and not excusing those who do. Everyone should just seek the truth that there is no justice.

Wells Quotes

They forget that a concession of the right to lynch a man for a certain crime, not only concedes the right to lynch any person for any crime, but (so frequently is the cry of rape now raised) it is in a fair way to stamp us as a race of rapists and desperadoes. They have gone on hoping and believing that general education and financial strength would solve the difficulty, and are devoting their energies to the accumulation of both. The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-Americans

Significance: The significance of this quote shows how white people will use any excuse such as rape to accuse Black people of crimes to not have them on equal footing in society.

Wells Quotes

Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro’s body were lost. The white man had no right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still less has he a right to kill him. But the Southern white people had been educated so long in that school of practice, in which might makes right, that they disdained to draw strict lines of action in dealing with the Negro. 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

Significance: This quote shows how deep-rooted the hatred towards Black people are from white people as they cannot unlearn the unequalness they see in the two races.

Wells Quotes

They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country

Significance: This quote is directed towards the government for staying silent and not holding white people accountable, poisoning what the rule of law means.

Wells Quotes

Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women

Significance: threadbare lie, an old but re-reused belief from society that is use as an excuse to lynch Black men.

Wells Quotes

The men and women of the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual law-breakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them

Significance: People who do not support lynching but stay silent about it are equally as accountable about those who participate in lynching.

Wells Quote

To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The white man’s dollar is his god and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities

Significance: The South is so proud of it’s economy, but Black people were the ones who helped the South’s economy progress so much, so if Black people were to revolt, the South would be left vulnerable.

Wells Quote

The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be gained by a further sacrifice of manhood and self-respect. By the right exercise of his power as the industrial factor of the South, the Afro-American can demand and secure his rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a fair trial for accused rapists

Significance: Wells discusses how Black people should appeal to white people’s economic self-interest to gain freedom as that is the only language oppressors truly respect.

Wells Quote

True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power…Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect

Significance: Wells emphasizes her disgust for the white people who believe their moral high ground allows them to keep their chivalry while sexually exploiting women of color.