Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors is aptly titled. While reading her accounts of the
lynchings that occurred throughout the South, I shook my head in disbelief: “I
cannot believe all of these things actually happened,” I kept thinking. “This is
horrifying.” Of course, all of the stories she told made me cringe, each
portrayed with gruesome—yet important—details. But the one that gripped me most
was the account of Lee Walker’s lynching in Memphis, Tennessee. Wrongly accused
of assaulting two white women who were traveling alone in a wagon, Walker attempted
to run away in order to save his life, knowing that his own explanation would
be ignored. A few days later, Walker was found and brought to jail, where he
waited “until the mob was ready for him.”[1] Soon, a bloodthirsty crowd
assembled, broke into the jail, forcefully abducted Walker, and drug him down
to Front Street. Once there, members of the mob scaled a telephone poll and
tied a rope to the top. Walker was then hanged and his body mutilated, “his
skin cut almost to ribbons.”[2] Not yet quenching their
thirst for violence, some of the assailants then cut down Walker’s body and
burned it right in the middle of Front Street. Several observers laughed while
the body blistered and burned; others scoured the area for relics, saving
pieces of the rope that was used to hang the innocent Walker and even
collecting the murdered man’s teeth and finger nails after he was burned.[3]
The story
of Lee Walker’s death haunted me because I have driven down Front Street
countless times and never knew of the atrocities suffered there. But it also
greatly increased my already-high level of respect for Ida B. Wells and her
anti-lynching work. To know that, in your own hometown, African Americans were
being brutally murdered for offenses they did not commit must have been
terrifying enough. To actively and effectively rail against these atrocities as
a black woman, however, required bravery of the rarest, most commendable sort. Given
the context that surrounded Wells as she wrote, her efforts are remarkable. And
it is upsetting that she is not given more attention historically as one of the
key figures who fought for civil rights. At least in the popular historical narrative,
Wells is often ignored.
The
King-centric chronicle that often pervades discussions of civil rights and the
Civil Rights Movement is even more upsetting when considering all that Wells—and
other lesser known figures—did to advocate against black oppression. King was
an extremely important figure, as were Rosa Parks, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm
X, and others. They were all instrumental in fighting against the mistreatment
of African Americans. Ignoring the work of late 19th and early 20th
century activists in favor of the more famous names aforementioned, though, is
a mistake. Complicating the satirical narrative that Julian Bond presented us
on the first day of class is essential—not only for those in academia, but also
for those outside of the ivory tower. Just as she tells the stories of others
in order to protest lynching, Wells’ own story and the story of other less
famous figures must be more widely presented so that perceptions of the history
of civil rights activism in the United States can become more judicious and less
misguided.
