"This brief volume introduces readers to the prominent reformer and journalist Ida B. Wells and her late-nineteenth-century crusade to abolish lynching. Built around three crucial documents - Well's pamphlet Southern horrors (1892), her essay A red record (1895), and her case study Mob rule in New Orleans (1900) - the volume shows how Wells defined lynching for an international audience as an issue deserving public concern and action. The editor's...

The diaries of Wells, a noted journalist and activist, reveal nineteenth- and twentieth-century black life in a major southern city.