The image above is a lynching that happened in 1891 in Alabama. The image shows a man being hanged by a mob documented by Ida B. Wells as one of her investigations. She was a journalist and an anti-lynching activist who took investigations seriously. She worked extremely hard and risked her life to expose the truths behind the wrong-doings of lynching’s happening in America.

No matter what obstacles came her way, she did not stop fighting for justice. Watch the video documentary as it breifly explains the becoming of one of the first activists against lynching’s.

Ida B. Wells investigations led her to believe that: 

“no colored man, no matter what his reputation, is safe from lynching if charged with insult or assault. This condition of affairs was brutal and horrible. Lynching mobs cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death. Not only are two hundred men and women put to death yearly, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity. Lynching’s occurred only because of crimes against women–as it is constantly declared by ministers, editors, lawyers, teachers, statesmen, and even by women themselves. They publish at every possible opportunity this excuse for lynching, hoping not only to palliate their own crimes but at the same time to prove that the negro is a moral monster and unworthy of the respect and sympathy of the civilized world..”