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===''Southern Horrors''===

In 1892, Ida B. Wells wrote ''Southern Horrors'' to document the practice of lynching in the South after three of her friends in Memphis were killed by a mob for operating a black-owned grocery store. Their lynching, and her subsequent pamphlet, inspired the teacher to pursue investigative journalism and an anti-lynching campaign.

It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The awful death-roll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling, not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service...".<ref name="Southern Horrors">[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm], Ida B. Wells, ''Southern Horrors''.</ref>

Wells wrote these because one of the most common assertions—or justifications for lynchings—was rape. Fears about miscegenation, or race mixing, shrouded criticisms against the Republican party during the Civil War, and after, many Southern whites feared that black equality was simply a way to legalize miscegenation. Other white Southerners believed that slavery had tamed African-Americans’ bestial, animal nature by introducing them to white civilization. Outside of the institution of slavery, blacks were reverting to their savage tendencies.<ref name"Manliness & Civilization">Gail Bederman, ''Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917'' p. 46-53.</ref>