In this 1910 article in Original Rights Magazine, Wells used the language and principles of the Declaration of Independence to continue the fight for Black enfranchisement, which, she explained, would create the political pressure necessary to fight against lynchings.
Explanation
Ida B. Wells was an influential civil rights crusader and suffragist. Born into slavery in Mississippi during the Civil War, she was freed as an infant when Union troops arrived in her town following the Emancipation Proclamation. Even then, Wells would go on to experience racial injustice in the segregated South. As a pioneering (and courageous) journalist, Wells investigated Southern white violence in the late 1890s and the early 1900s. Through meticulous work, she exposed hundreds of lynchings throughout the Jim Crow South. With W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey, she helped to create one of the nation’s most influential civil rights organizations—the NAACP. And while fighting for women’s suffrage, she often criticized racism within parts of the movement, choosing to focus on mobilizing the African American community to promote racial progress. In this 1910 article in Original Rights Magazine, Wells used the language and principles of the Declaration of Independence to continue the fight for Black enfranchisement, which, she explained, would create the political pressure necessary to fight against lynchings.
Excerpt
The flower of the nineteenth century civilization for the American people was the abolition of slavery, and the enfranchisement of all manhood. Here at last was squaring of practice with precept, with true democracy, with the Declaration of Independence and with the Golden Rule. The reproach and disgrace of the twentieth century is that the whole of the American people have permitted a part, to nullify this glorious achievement, and make the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution playthings, a mockery and a byword; an absolute dead letter in the Constitution of the United States. One-third of the states of the union have made and enforced laws which abridge the rights of American citizens. Although the Constitution specially says, no state shall do so. they do deprive persons of life, liberty and property without due process of law, and do deny equal protection of the laws to persons of Negro descent. The right of citizens to vote is denied and abridged in these states, on account of race, color and previous condition of servitude, and has been so denied ever since the withdrawal of the United States troops from the South. This in spite of the fifteenth amendment, which declares that no state shall do this.
These rights were denied first by violence and bloodshed, by ku-klux klans, who during the first years after the Civil War murdered Negroes by wholesale, for attempting to exercise the rights given by these amendments, and for trusting the government which was powerful enough to give them the ballot, to be strong enough to protect them in its exercise. Senator [Benjamin] Tillman [of South Carolina] told how it was done in a speech on the floor of the United States Senate, when he said, that he and the people of South Carolina shot Negroes to death to keep them from voting. This they did till Congressional investigation of Ku-Klux methods turned the limelight on the unspeakable barbarism of those wholesale murders.
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With no sacredness of the ballot there can be no sacredness of human life itself. For if the strong can take the weak man's ballot. when it suits his purpose to do so, he will take his life also. Having successfully swept aside the constitutional safeguards to the ballot. it is the smallest of small matters for the South to sweep aside its own safeguards to human life. Thus “trial by jury” for the black man in that section has become a mockery, a plaything of the ruling classes and rabble alike. The mob says: “This people has no vote with which to punish us or the consenting officers of the law, therefore we indulge our brutal instincts, give free rein to race prejudice and lynch, hang, burn them when we please.” Therefore, the more complete the disfranchisement, the more frequent and horrible has been the hangings, shootings, and burnings.
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The Negroes of Illinois have taken counsel together for a number of years over Illinois’ increased lynching record. They elected one of their number to the State Legislature in 1904, who secured the passage of a bill which provided for the suppression of mob violence, not only by punishment of those who incited lynchings, but provided for damages against the City and County permitting lynchings. The Bill goes further and provides that if any person shall be taken from the custody of the Sheriff or his deputy and lynched, it shall be prima facie evidence of failure on the part of the Sheriff to do his duty.
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It is believed that this decision with its slogan “Mob law can have no place in Illinois” has given lynching its death blow in this State. On three separate occasions since Sheriffs of other Counties in the State have checked the formation of mobs by calling at once on the Governor for troops, and in this way prevented the scheduled lynching.
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In this work all may aid. Individuals, organizations, press and pulpit should unite in vigorous denunciation of all forms of lawlessness and earnest, constant demand for the rigid enforcement of the law of the land. Nay, more than this, there must spring up in all sections of the country vigilant, aggressive defenders of the Constitution of our beloved land. South Carolina and her section have dominated this country to its hurt and sorrow from the beginning. When Payne wrote the Declaration of Independence, South Carolina refused to come into the Federation Colonies unless they struck out the clause abolishing slavery. She won, and slavery was fastened as an octopus upon the vitals of the land. She was responsible for the cringing, compromising, yielding attitude of Congress on the slavery question for the fifty years preceding the war. She fired on the flag of the United States and for the fifth time attempted to secede from the Union. She plunged the country into the most terrible Civil War the world has ever known. She has led in all the secession movements for the nullification of the constitution and for the abrogation of the 14th and 15th amendment. She has led in all the butcheries on the helpless Negro which makes the United States appear a more cruel government than Russia, for her deeds are not done under the guise of democracy and in the name of liberty.
