Black Woman Reformer

Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism

Title Details

Pages: 224

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 03/15/2018

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5378-4

List Price: $30.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 02/15/2015

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4557-4

List Price: $55.95

eBook

Pub Date: 02/15/2015

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4692-2

List Price: $55.95

Black Woman Reformer

Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism

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  • Description
  • Reviews

During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a “black lady reformer”—a role American society denied her—and assert her right to defend her race from abroad. Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Britain, Black Woman Reformer by Sarah Silkey explores Wells’s 1893–94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society.

Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates on lynching in both Britain and the United States. No longer content to view lynching as a benign form of frontier justice, Britons accepted Wells’s assertion that lynching was a racially motivated act of brutality designed to enforce white supremacy. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with potential foreign investors were forced to choose whether to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells’s campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.

This excellent account of British interpretations of America’s violent racial history challenges our assumptions about the international antilynching campaign. The author makes a compelling case for Ida B. Wells not simply as a beneficiary of British support but as a force in driving the transatlantic debate.

—Beverly Greene Bond, coeditor of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times

Black Woman Reformer is a dynamic and insightful volume that breathes new life into the story of a famous and important figure by placing Wells’s antilynching campaign within a larger transatlantic reform movement. Silkey’s study makes a major contribution to African American history, the history of mob violence, and the history of Gilded Age reform movements.

—William D. Carrigan, author of The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916

Using Ida B. Wells, Mississippi-born civil rights activist and anti-lynching crusader, as a central figure, Silkey gives readers a compelling understanding of Wells's anti-lynching campaigns, including her two tours of England in the 1890s, which provides an understanding of the persuasive context on lynching as presented to British reformers.

—T. F. Armstrong, Choice

Through an exploration of British perspectives on lynching, Black Woman Reformer broadens the scope of what is typically viewed as a distinctly southern phenomenon.

—Lauren Acker, Journal of Southern History

About the Author/Editor

SARAH L. SILKEY is an assistant professor of history at Lycoming College.