The Categories of Cruelty: Reading Ida B. Wells’s A Red Record

Jon Libricola in exploring how Ida B. Wells transformed the act of recordkeeping into a powerful indictment of racial violence in America.

This month our blog looks at how abolition and women’s rights overlapped in the 19th century. It prompted me to revisit Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), a Black investigative journalist, writer, newspaper owner, suffragist, activist, and co-founder of the NAACP. I have taught her powerful work, Mob Rule in New Orleans, about a police manhunt that became a deadly race riot. 

I recently read Wells’s A Red Record, subtitled Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894. Wells crusaded against the widespread lynching that destroyed thousands of lives between the Civil War and the 1940s. She wrote many pieces to expose and protest it. 

Sometimes things we read create startling contexts for each other. While reading Wells, I was finishing Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. It explores the development of paper technologies, ranging from how paper’s availability ushered in Renaissance art to the private writing of commonplace books. I’d like to write more on Allen’s book, but reading about commonplace books created a painful juxtaposition I will focus on here. 

A commonplace book is one individual’s collection of significant quotes or excerpts from reading, organized by topic. Although trending today, its roots go back centuries. Allen lists the page headings, or topics, of one commonplace-keeper, and that is what struck me reading Wells. Taken from vetted reports of lynchings in the Chicago Tribune, as reported by white sources, A Red Record contains so many examples over three years, that Wells had to organize them into categories: by state and by reason, with numbers for each type of reason, including the names of the lynched, the manner of lynching, and specific locations. Commonplace books might include categories such as “Friendship,” “God,” or “Books I Have Read.” Notably, Wells’s categories are organized by why people were murdered by mobs: crimes with the word “Alleged,” “Writing a Letter to a White Woman,” “No Offense,” “Because They Were Saucy,” and “Because the Jury Acquitted Him.”

Wells’s tone is measured and journalistic. She begins, “The student of American sociology will find the year 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening…to a system of anarchy and outlawry…scenes of unusual brutality…” She does not spare the reader one detail of the hysterical, bloodthirsty, brutal events she covers. Her tone is controlled and professional, but the material screams. She writes, 

It is a well established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy. Herein rests our respect for the law. The Negro does not claim that all of the one thousand black men women and children, who have been hanged, shot and burned alive during the past ten years, were innocent of the charges made against them…But we do insist that the punishment is not the same…In lynching…the excited bloodthirsty mob demands that the rule of law be reversed and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the victim of their hate and revenge…is bound hand and foot and swung into eternity.

Allen’s book covers people recording information for their pleasure and education, and Wells must employ the same technique to organize hundreds of horrific acts of violence. The benign pastime of writing down what is personally memorable was adjacent in my mind to Wells’s work to record and communicate a vital, terrible truth. At at time when the legitimacy of primary source documents is being frequently questioned, those used by Ida B. Wells to create A Red Record are invaluable to American history.