Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
Glossary
B
- Bishop Fitzgerald's Apologia
- Wells's rebuttal to Bishop O.P. Fitzgerald, a Methodist Episcopal Church South clergyman who argued that those who condemned lynching showed no corresponding sympathy for the white women supposedly being defended. Wells names him as an example of the South's respectable religious leadership lending moral cover to mob violence, noting he had "become apologist for lynchers of the rapists of white women only" — silent on the routine, unpunished rape of Black women by white men that she documents elsewhere in the pamphlet. She treats his position as representative of Southern clergy's broader failure to oppose lynching.
- Related: Governor Tillman's Threat, The "Usual Crime"
- Boycott and Emigration
- The two collective-action strategies Wells proposes alongside armed self-defense: organized withdrawal of Black patronage from streetcars, railroads, and businesses in towns that tolerated lynching, and organized departure from the most dangerous localities altogether. She documents both already occurring in practice — Memphis's Black population leaving "by thousands" after the People's Grocery lynching, crippling local streetcar and retail revenue — and argues that Southern commerce's dependence on Black labor and consumer spending gave the community a leverage that appeals to conscience never had.
- Related: Self-Help, The People's Grocery Lynching, The Separate Car Law
F
- Frederick Douglass's Letter
- An October 25, 1892 letter from Frederick Douglass to Wells, reprinted as the pamphlet's second chapter, praising her "faithful paper on the lynch abomination" and crediting her with testifying "from actual knowledge" where his own oratory had been comparatively "feeble." Douglass's endorsement lent the 74-year-old elder statesman's authority to Wells's investigative journalism at a moment when she was a 30-year-old woman writing from exile. The letter also voices his despair that American conscience, church, and clergy remained only "half alive" to the crisis.
G
- Governor Tillman's Threat
- South Carolina Governor Benjamin Tillman's public June 1892 declaration, made standing beneath a tree in Barnwell where eight Black men had been hanged the previous year, that he personally would lead a mob to lynch a Black man who raped a white woman. Wells cites the statement as proof that lynch law was endorsed at the highest levels of Southern political authority, not merely tolerated among the "lawless element," and notes that officials who set the practice in motion for one pretext proved powerless to confine it once mobs extended the same license to any charge at all.
- Related: Bishop Fitzgerald's Apologia
J
- Judge Lynch
- Wells's personification of the mob as a figure of false judicial authority — an unelected, unaccountable "judge" who convenes no trial, hears no defense, and answers to no court. She invokes the phrase to underscore the irony that a nation priding itself on due process allowed a fictional magistrate to preside over hundreds of extrajudicial killings. The device recurs across her writing as shorthand for the entire machinery of mob rule.
- Related: Lynch Law
L
- Lynch Law
- The extralegal practice of mob killing used throughout the post-Reconstruction South to punish, terrorize, and ultimately subordinate Black communities, carried out without trial, evidence, or legal process. Wells argues that lynch law was not, as its defenders claimed, a response to Black criminality but a deliberate instrument for enforcing white supremacy after emancipation removed slavery's economic controls. The Chicago Tribune's own tabulations counted 728 Black Americans killed this way over the preceding eight years, only about a third of them even charged with rape.
- Related: Judge Lynch, The Chicago Tribune Statistics, The "Usual Crime"
M
- Miscegenation Laws
- State statutes across the South criminalizing marriage or legal union between Black and white people, which Wells argues operated in only one direction in practice. She writes that such laws "leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can" while making it "death to the colored man" who responded to the advances of a white woman — meaning relationships that could never be legitimized instead surfaced as rape accusations. She cites Sarah Clark of Memphis, indicted for miscegenation for living openly with a Black man, who avoided prosecution by testifying under oath that she was not white.
- Related: The "Usual Crime"
S
- Self-Help
- The closing chapter's argument, and the pamphlet's ultimate thesis, that Black Americans must rely on their own economic and physical power rather than appeals to white conscience to end lynching. Wells identifies three concrete tools: withdrawing labor and patronage from businesses in lynching localities, since "the white man's dollar is his god"; emigrating from the most violent towns; and arming Black households with rifles for self-defense, since every documented case of a threatened lynching that failed involved armed resistance.
- Related: Boycott and Emigration, The Winchester Rifle Doctrine
T
- The "Usual Crime"
- Wells's term for the automatic, near-universal rape charge leveled against Black men accused in lynching cases, which she demonstrates was invoked far more often than it was true. Citing the Chicago Tribune's finding that only a third of lynching victims were even charged with rape, she documents specific cases — including Mrs. J.S. Underwood's own confession that her accusation against William Offett was a fabrication to hide a consensual relationship — where the charge protected a white woman's reputation rather than describing an actual crime. Her central argument is that the rape pretext functioned to enforce racial subordination and punish Black economic independence, not to answer real sexual violence.
- Related: Lynch Law, Miscegenation Laws
- The Chicago Tribune Statistics
- A tabulation compiled and published by the Chicago Tribune at the start of 1892, counting 728 Black Americans lynched in the South over the preceding eight years. Wells relies on the figure — drawn from a mainstream white newspaper rather than her own reporting, to preempt accusations of bias — to show that fewer than fifty of the deaths were even claimed to be politically motivated and only about a third involved a rape charge of any kind. She adds that at least 150 more lynchings occurred in just the nine months following the Tribune's count, evidence that the practice was accelerating, not receding.
- Related: Lynch Law, The "Usual Crime"
- The Cotton Exchange Meeting
- The gathering of Memphis's leading white businessmen at the Cotton Exchange Building on the evening of May 25, 1892, convened after the Free Speech's editorial ran, where open threats of lynching against the paper's editors were "freely indulged" — not, Wells notes pointedly, by an unruly mob but by the city's respectable commercial elite. The meeting led directly to the destruction of the paper's office and the expulsion of its owners. Wells uses the episode to argue that lynch law was sanctioned by Southern society's most prominent citizens, not merely its "lawless element."
- Related: The Free Speech, The Memphis Exile
- The Free Speech
- The Memphis newspaper Wells co-owned and edited, formally the Free Speech and Headlight, which gave the city's Black community an independent voice on lynching, politics, and civil rights. Its May 21, 1892 editorial questioning the automatic rape charge against lynched Black men — and suggesting some interracial relationships were consensual — provoked a mob to destroy its offices while Wells was traveling in the North. The paper's destruction forced her into permanent exile from Memphis and directly produced the pamphlet in which this glossary's terms appear.
- Related: The Memphis Exile, The "Usual Crime", The Cotton Exchange Meeting
- The Memphis Exile
- Wells's forced, permanent separation from her adopted home city after the destruction of the Free Speech in late May 1892. Warned by telegram that she would be killed if she returned — her business partner J.L. Fleming had already fled the mob — Wells remained in the North and turned the crisis into the investigative writing collected in this pamphlet, first published as the article "Exiled" in the New York Age. The exile marks the origin of her career as a national anti-lynching journalist.
- Related: The Free Speech, The Cotton Exchange Meeting
- The People's Grocery Lynching
- The March 9, 1892 lynching of three Memphis grocers — Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart — who had armed themselves after a white rival, threatened by their store's success, led an armed posse against them. When the men fired on the posse in the dark, wounding several officers, all were jailed as "conspirators"; three were secretly pulled from their cells and murdered before any trial. Wells presents the killing of her personal friend Thomas Moss as the catalyst that turned her from a journalist covering lynching into an investigator determined to expose it as an instrument of economic terror against successful Black businesses, not a response to crime.
- Related: The Free Speech, Boycott and Emigration
- The Separate Car Law
- Legislation, exemplified by a bill passed by the Kentucky legislature over the objection of Black petitioners and delegations, mandating racially segregated railway cars — commonly called the "Jim Crow Car." Wells cites the law as part of the broader post-Reconstruction rollback of Black civil rights following the repeal of the federal Civil Rights Bill, and proposes that Black Kentuckians boycott the railroads entirely, noting a Covington correspondent's estimate that lost patronage was already costing the rail companies as much as a million dollars a year.
- Related: Boycott and Emigration, Self-Help
- The Winchester Rifle Doctrine
- Wells's explicit recommendation, stated in the pamphlet's final chapter, that "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home" as protection the law refused to provide. She grounds the claim in documented cases from Jacksonville, Florida and Paducah, Kentucky where armed self-defense was the only factor that prevented a threatened lynching, arguing that white aggressors would develop "greater respect for Afro-American life" once violence carried mutual risk.
- Related: Self-Help