Ida B. Wells and the Statistical Method of Resistance

Ida B. Wells understood, from the beginning, that the argument about lynching was being won by the people who committed it. The justification they offered, that the killings were responses to crimes against white women, was repeated in Southern newspapers, in congressional testimony, and in the national press as though it were a documented fact. It was not a documented fact. Wells decided to document the actual facts.

Between eighteen ninety-two and eighteen ninety-five, she combed through newspaper accounts of lynching cases from across the South, counting and cross-referencing. She was working from newspaper accounts because those were the records that existed; police did not investigate, courts did not prosecute, and no federal agency kept data. She compiled her findings, checked her numbers, and published them.

"Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," published in eighteen ninety-two, was the first systematic analysis of racial terror in the United States. "A Red Record," published in eighteen ninety-five, extended the analysis and documented lynchings across three years, eighteen ninety-two through eighteen ninety-four. Wells calculated that the justification cited in defense of lynching, the protection of white women, was cited in fewer than one-third of the documented cases. The actual causes included economic competition, political organizing, and disputes over property.

The method she invented: take the claim, find the evidence, count it, publish the numbers. It was adopted by the NAACP, which began its own statistical documentation of racial violence beginning in nineteen oh nine and used it to lobby Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation for decades. It is the direct antecedent of the Equal Justice Initiative's twenty-first century work, which documented more than four thousand racial terror lynchings in the American South between eighteen seventy-seven and nineteen fifty.

Wells did this from exile in New York, having been driven from Memphis with death threats in eighteen ninety-two. She never returned. The statistical method of resistance she invented proved more durable than the institutions that drove her out.