LibraryThe Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States

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Wells turns the Chicago Tribune's own numbers into an indictment of a nation.

The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States

Ida B. Wells · 1895

Three years after Southern Horrors, Wells returned with a national data record: lynching victims tabulated by name, date, alleged offense, and place, drawn from the white press's own count, the Chicago Tribune's. Frederick Douglass's letter endorsing the pamphlet opens it. Read alongside Southern Horrors, it shows Wells scaling a single newspaper's exposed rape pretext into a two-year national ledger — case-by-case testimony backed by tables her critics could not easily wave away.

This pamphlet documents lynching and other racial violence using the period's own reporting and language, presented unaltered as Wells wrote it. It additionally tabulates lynching victims by name, date, and place across two full years — the lists are not an aside. Naming and counting the dead, using the white press's own numbers, is the pamphlet's central argument: documentation as resistance.
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11 chapters · 34,104 words · ~2.6 hr read

Contents

Preface

Frederick Douglass's open letter endorsing the pamphlet.

The Statistical Case

Wells states her case, tabulates the Chicago Tribune's own 1893 count, and documents it case by case — imbeciles, innocent relatives, trivial charges, and disputed rape allegations.

The Crusade, the Record, and the Remedy

Wells defends her international campaign against a prominent critic, extends the tabulated record through 1894, and closes with the remedies she proposes.