Thank you to Project Guttenberg for making this volume available. Ida B Wells shares facts and feelings to display some of the horrors suffered at the hands of some soulless people. ( )

This is a very short book, pamphlet size written by Ida B. Wells. The office of her paper of which she was the publisher, editor, and reporter of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight was attacked by a mob that destroyed her equipment and burn the office to the ground. Her life was endangered by her reports of the lynchings during her time. Fortunately, she had fled to Chicago in time. The details that she reports are extremely painful and gut- wrenching to read.

But I believe that everyone, Black and White must read about what happened. Often the precipitating event was something major or minor that went on between a white woman and black man. Emmett Till's death could have easily fit into this book. All of this is part of the idea of white supremacy and to understand and destroy the existence, this and other books must be read.

I bought this book for myself and plan on reading her autobiography on a later date. This book needs to he considered an important and sorrowful document of our history.

Don't let the three stars deceive you, this writing is incredible. Ida Wells was one of the greatest writers in the Reconstruction Period, end of discussion. But her descriptions of growing up in slavery, being freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and continuing to see awful racist hatred... it's difficult to get through. It was legitimately emotionally painful. My ratings tend to be based upon my experience reading the book, so I have to put it at 3/5 because it was a good read but also I don't know if I can ever recommend it to somebody.

That being said, I suppose if you're looking to study politics or history, you have to read things like this. You can't understand the United States without pulling away the frills and leaving bare the horrors we've committed against our own people. To distance ourselves from it is dangerous, and that's why this book is as important as it is heart-wrenching. ( )

Interesting on so many levels, it is a cry of outrage against Southern lynch culture, it is an example of early editorial journalism, and it is a scathing critique of media representations of black and white, in an era when Southern newspapers regularly wrote of white "gentleman" and "Negro scoundrels." Wells brings into sharp relief the extreme and ever present danger of being a black man in America, not only in the South.

This work is interesting in an entirely different way for its lack of names and dates and place names throughout the litany of lynching stories Wells presents here. I'm not sure if this vagueness is out of kindness to victims and their families, in the way newspapers today don't name minors involved in crimes, or whether the lack of verifiable detail in Wells's writing about lynch culture is simply a representation of how young the craft of journalism was in her era. ( )

Short and searing.

Ida B. Wells does an incredible job researching lynchings reported in the South. In 1892 she works hard to discover if the men lynched had been in fact charged with any crime or if the crime itself was a rumour, based upon a single allegation.

Frederick Douglass gives this piece his blessing and after reading it, I can see why.

While reading, I couldn't help but think of the unmitigated violence against black people by police in the United States. Men, in positions of power, who escape egregious actions by nothing more than the shadow of their authority.

I thought this book would be difficult to read, and at moments, of course, it was, but her determination rose above all the descriptions of the crimes. I felt her longing for justice.

Edit: Still think about this book, and Emmett Till, who was lynched 63 years ago. Within my mother's lifetime. This book will stay with me. ( )