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

Glossary

B

Bishop Haygood's Apologia: Wells's rebuttal to Atticus Haygood, a Methodist bishop and college president who defended lynching in the journal The Forum by citing, without evidence beyond another clergyman's unsubstantiated "belief," a claim that hundreds of white women were being assaulted by Black men. Wells shows Haygood also misstated the physical facts of the murder of four-year-old Myrtle Vance in Paris, Texas, to justify the torture-killing of the man accused of it, and treats his writing as representative of the respectable religious cover lynching received throughout the South.; Related: The Three Excuses, Henry Smith's Burning at Paris

F

Frederick Douglass's Letter: An October 1894 letter from Frederick Douglass to Wells, reprinted as the opening chapter of A Red Record, praising her investigative work and crediting her testimony as more convincing than his own oratory. Douglass's introduction frames the pamphlet's central historical argument — later developed in his own analysis of the South's shifting justifications for lynching — and lends his authority as the era's most prominent Black statesman to Wells's statistical case against mob violence.; Related: The Three Excuses

H

Henry Smith's Burning at Paris: The February 1, 1893 killing of Henry Smith, a Black laborer accused of murdering four-year-old Myrtle Vance in Paris, Texas, who was publicly tortured and burned to death before a crowd Wells's sources estimate at ten thousand people. Wells reprints a white newspaper's own eyewitness account specifically to show that the press that reported the killing as righteous punishment also documented its extremity, and pairs it with testimony from Reverend King, a Black minister who tried to stop the crowd and was driven out of Texas for it.; Related: Bishop Haygood's Apologia, Reverend King's Testimony

J

Judge Albion Tourgée, "The Bystander": The byline of Albion W. Tourgée, a white former judge and novelist who wrote a column called "The Bystander" for the Chicago Inter Ocean and independently investigated the 1892 burning of Edward Coy in Texarkana. His findings — that Coy's accuser had been in a yearlong consensual relationship with him and was pressured into lighting the fire that killed him — corroborate Wells's central claim using a white investigator's independent reporting rather than her testimony alone.

L

Lynch-Law's Alleged-Causes Taxonomy: The category-by-category breakdown Wells reproduces from the Tribune's data, listing the stated justification for each lynching — categories that in 1893 alone included not only rape and murder but "incendiarism," "insulting whites," "no offense," "race prejudice," and "self-defense." By printing the raw taxonomy verbatim, Wells lets the record itself demonstrate that most lynchings answered no crime remotely comparable to what apologists claimed, let alone rape.; Related: The Chicago Tribune Tabulations

R

Reverend King's Testimony: The eyewitness account of a Black minister, identified only as Reverend King, who attempted to halt the burning of Henry Smith at Paris, Texas, was struck unconscious with a rifle butt for it, and was subsequently driven out of the state. Wells reprints his description, given to a New York newspaper, as rare surviving testimony from a Black witness to a lynching, since most such accounts reached the public only through the words of participants or approving local press.; Related: Henry Smith's Burning at Paris

T

The "Ten Thousand" Death Toll: Wells's opening statistic, compiled from records kept by white authorities and the white press, that more than ten thousand Black Americans were killed without trial in the three decades following emancipation, while only three white men were ever tried, convicted, and executed for murdering a Black person in that same period. She presents the disparity as proof that the legal system's protections functioned in only one direction, regardless of which pretext a given lynching claimed.; Related: The Chicago Tribune Tabulations
The British Anti-Lynching Crusade: Wells's 1893-94 speaking tours through England and Scotland, which built a network of British clergy, editors, and reform figures — organized as the Anti-Lynching Committee under honorary secretary Florence Balgarnie — willing to pressure American opinion from outside the country's own press and pulpit. Wells presents British newspaper reaction, including warnings from the Times that lynching endangered English investment in Southern industry, as the first form of accountability that made American governors and church bodies begin addressing lynching publicly at all.; Related: The Frances Willard Controversy
The Brooks County Massacre: The killing of seven Black men in Brooks County, Georgia on December 23, 1894, after they were unable or unwilling to disclose the whereabouts of a man named Pike, wanted for killing a white man; Wells reports that the wives and daughters of the murdered men were also assaulted by the same mob. Occurring just as the year's lynching tables closed, the massacre made Georgia the state with the highest lynching total in the Tribune's 1894 count, and Wells presents it as evidence that the crusade's growing visibility had not yet slowed the violence it described.; Related: The Chicago Tribune Tabulations
The C.J. Miller Lynching: The July 1893 killing of C.J. Miller, a man from Springfield, Illinois falsely identified as the murderer of two girls near Wickliffe, Kentucky, despite a telegram confirming his stated identity and a bloodhound trail that had pointed toward a different, lighter-skinned suspect before Miller was seized. Miller maintained his innocence through hours of interrogation before he was hanged and his body burned. Wells uses the case — among the most thoroughly documented in the pamphlet — to show that even the mob's own investigative methods, followed honestly, pointed away from the person it killed.
The Carrollton, Alabama Jail Massacre: The killing of three people — Paul Hill and siblings Paul and William Archer — and a woman named Emma Fair, held in the Carrollton, Alabama jail on suspicion of arson and awaiting trial, when a mob armed with shotguns fired volley after volley into their locked cells. None had been convicted of any crime, and none was accused of an offense against a person. Wells cites the massacre alongside a similar 1894 killing near Memphis to argue that the public reacted to nearly identical crimes with outrage in one case and indifference in the other, depending only on how much international attention the anti-lynching crusade had already drawn.
The Chicago Tribune Tabulations: Yearly lynching statistics compiled and published by the Chicago Tribune beginning January 1, 1892, which Wells adopts as her primary source throughout A Red Record specifically because they came from a mainstream white newspaper rather than her own investigation, insulating her argument from charges of bias or exaggeration. The tabulations, reproduced chapter by chapter for 1892, 1893, and 1894, record each victim's name, location, and the offense charged, and form the evidentiary spine of the pamphlet's argument that fewer than a third of lynchings even involved a rape accusation.; Related: Lynch-Law's Alleged-Causes Taxonomy, The "Ten Thousand" Death Toll
The Frances Willard Controversy: Wells's public dispute with Frances Willard, president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who accused Wells in a November 1894 convention address of slandering white women and who had earlier, in an 1890 interview, described Black voters in language Wells reprints as itself steeped in the same stereotypes lynching apologists relied on. Wells's rebuttal — that a movement built on protecting "home and native land" had never once condemned lynching until forced to by British pressure — became one of the most widely covered exchanges of the American anti-lynching crusade, and strained her relationship with white temperance reformers for years afterward.; Related: The W.C.T.U.'s Silence
The Hamp Biscoe Killing: The February 1892 killing near England, Arkansas of Hamp Biscoe, a farmer whom Wells's source describes as mentally unwell after years of disputed land litigation, along with his wife and their thirteen-year-old son. After Biscoe fired on a constable attempting his arrest, a mob removed the wounded family from official custody that night and shot them; the dying boy identified his family's killers by description before he died, and the sheriff's own letter to an inquiring citizen admitted the killers were known locally and would not be named. Wells uses the case to show mobs killed people already established to be irresponsible for their actions, with officials making no pretense of investigating.
The Julian Family Lynching: The August 1893 killing of three brothers of Roselius Julian — a Black man who had shot a white judge near New Orleans and escaped into the swamps — after a mob failed to find Julian himself and turned on his family instead. Two brothers were hanged in a pasture and a third, Paul, was hanged separately at Camp Parapet; a fourth man, John Willis, unrelated to the Julians and unable to tell the mob where the fugitive was hiding, was kicked to death the same day. Wells presents the episode as proof that mobs punished kinship and proximity as readily as any alleged crime.
The Lee Walker Lynching: The July 1893 killing of Lee Walker in Memphis, accused of frightening two white women he approached while asking for food, a charge he denied. A mob broke into the county jail over the sheriff's objections, mutilated and hanged Walker, then burned his body in the street before a crowd that included women and children, with bystanders afterward collecting his teeth and fingernails as souvenirs. Wells includes the Memphis Commercial's own detailed account, printed as ordinary local news, to demonstrate that white newspapers reported such killings with something closer to approval than alarm.
The Remedy's Program: The pamphlet's closing chapter, which converts the preceding statistical record into a five-point call to action: circulate the book's facts, secure resolutions of condemnation from churches and civic organizations, publicize Southern lynching's chilling effect on outside investment, treat the crusade as a test of American self-government rather than a sectional grievance, and support Congressman Henry Blair's 1894 House resolution to fund a federal investigation into lynching's true causes. Wells frames the program as evidence that exposure, not appeals to conscience alone, was the lever most likely to force change.; Related: The British Anti-Lynching Crusade
The Roanoke Militia Stand: The September 1893 confrontation in Roanoke, Virginia, in which Mayor Trout called out the state militia to protect a Black prisoner named Smith from a mob after a dispute — falsely reported as an assault — between Smith and a white market vendor. Nine members of the mob were killed in the resulting exchange of gunfire before the militia was withdrawn; the mob returned the following morning, seized Smith from police custody, and lynched and burned him regardless. Wells cites the case as the era's most serious attempt by civil authority to prevent a lynching, and its failure as proof that even armed resistance by the state could only delay, not stop, a determined mob.
The Three Excuses: Wells's framework, drawn from an essay by Frederick Douglass, describing the sequence of justifications white Southerners offered for lynching Black Americans after emancipation: first that mobs were suppressing alleged "race riots" and insurrections (1865-72), then that violence was needed to prevent "Negro domination" of Reconstruction-era politics, and finally, once Black disenfranchisement made both excuses obsolete, that lynching was necessary to punish the rape of white women. Wells argues each excuse was invented to fit the moment and that the underlying purpose — racial subordination — never changed.; Related: Frederick Douglass's Letter, Bishop Haygood's Apologia
The W.C.T.U.'s Silence: Wells's documentation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's decade-long refusal to pass any resolution condemning lynching, despite passing resolutions against card-playing, dancing, and tobacco in the same years. She recounts the 1894 Cleveland convention, where a promised anti-lynching resolution was quietly dropped from the floor after a caucus of Southern delegates, and only a watered-down substitute — one that echoed the rape pretext it claimed to condemn — appeared in the union's own newspaper afterward.; Related: The Frances Willard Controversy