In the spring of 1892, Ida B. Wells had had enough. The 29-year-old Memphis editor was sick of reading about the lynchings of Black Americans and angry about the bogus excuse often used to justify them: fraudulent claims of sexual assault — “the same old racket,” as she called it. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women.”
And so she set out to convince other Americans. Wells collected data for hundreds of cases, investigated dozens herself and even hired private investigators, and carefully tracked and catalogued how those cases were reported. What she found was a concerted newspaper campaign of false propaganda that encouraged lynching and then excused or covered it up.
