Ida B. Wells and the Lynching of Black Women.
▻https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/ida-b-wells-lynching-black-women.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur
At least 130 black women were murdered by lynch mobs from 1880 to 1930. This violence against black women has long been ignored or forgotten. Not anymore. Eliza Woods’s name is now engraved on one of the 800 weathered steel columns hanging from the ceiling of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened Thursday in Montgomery, Ala.
When most Americans imagine lynching, they envision the tortured and mutilated body of a black man accused of raping a white woman. They rarely think of a black woman “stripped naked and hung.” Wells, however, was well aware that black women were victims of Southern mob violence and also targets of rape by white men.
In 1892, when mobs across the South murdered more than 200 African-American men and women, including one of Wells’s closest friends, she began to systematically investigate lynchings. As I’ve noted in my academic work, she soon discovered that few victims had even been accused of rape. In an editorial, she wrote that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” In retaliation, a white mob destroyed her press and warned Wells, who was in New York at the time, not to come back or risk death.