Summary
This document, Crusade for Justice, Autobiography, by Ida B. Wells, is a personal account, in which Wells recalls how her involvement in African American activism began. Specifically, it began when she heard an account of the lynchings of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, who owned a grocery store that directly competed with a grocery store that was owned by a white man. Until this time, Wells had taken many reasons for lynchings at face value. Most commonly, these lynchings involved the purported rape of white women. However, the lack of such a claim in this lynching led Wells to question the true purpose of lynchings, and she came to realize that lynchings were simply a means by which white men enforced their own superiority. She also observed the hypocritical nature of these lynchings, as many white men continued the practice of taking black women as mistresses, and yet these same men took the lives of black men who had been taken as lovers voluntarily by white women. It is at this point that Wells comes to her main point, that the stories of rape given as justification for lynching black men were not only a way for these white men to cover up their crimes, but also a method by which “the entire race [could] be branded as moral monsters and despoilers of white women”, and thus “rob …show more content…
Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. She was the daughter of slaves born in a confederate state. Luckily for her the Emancipation Declaration was decreed 6 months after she was born and she was able to grow up as a free woman. Her father, James, was one of the founders of Shaw University where she was able to attend school until the age of 16 when her parents died of yellow fever. She was then the sole provider for her younger siblings. As fate would have it, Ida was a very smart woman and managed to convince the administrator of a school that she was actually 18, with this act she was able to land herself a job as a
This document, Crusade for Justice, Autobiography, by Ida B. Wells, is a personal account, in which Wells recalls how her involvement in African American activism began. Specifically, it began when she heard an account of the lynchings of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, who owned a grocery store that directly competed with a grocery store that was owned by a white man. Until this time, Wells had taken many reasons for lynchings at face value. Most commonly, these lynchings involved the purported rape of white women. However, the lack of such a claim in this lynching led Wells to question the true purpose of lynchings, and she came to realize that lynchings were simply a means by which white men enforced their own superiority. She also observed the hypocritical nature of these lynchings, as many white men continued the practice of taking black women as mistresses, and yet these same men took the lives of black men who had been taken as lovers voluntarily by white women. It is at this point that Wells comes to her main point, that the stories of rape given as justification for lynching black men were not only a way for these white men to cover up their crimes, but also a method by which “the entire race [could] be branded as moral monsters and despoilers of white women”, and thus “rob …show more content…
Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. She was the daughter of slaves born in a confederate state. Luckily for her the Emancipation Declaration was decreed 6 months after she was born and she was able to grow up as a free woman. Her father, James, was one of the founders of Shaw University where she was able to attend school until the age of 16 when her parents died of yellow fever. She was then the sole provider for her younger siblings. As fate would have it, Ida was a very smart woman and managed to convince the administrator of a school that she was actually 18, with this act she was able to land herself a job as a