Southern Horrors and Other Writings essays

Southern Horrors and Other Writings essays What is mob violence? Well, nowadays, mob violence differs in comparison to mob violence in the nineteenth century. In the years following the Civil War, there was a lot of mistreatment of African Americans. Ida B. Wells, a young African American journalist, investigated and accounted for the violence acted upon the African Americans during the Post-Reconstruction period. Wells wrote about her investigations because she belied it was the " first step to tell the world the facts" and to make lynching "a crime against American values"(27). In the book Southern Horrors and Other Writings, Royster discussed the mob violence of the lower South and the steps that Wells took to end this violence. During the nineteenth century, a lot of different acts of mob violence were done to the African Americans in the South. Wells focused on lynching of African Americans by the mob. The reasons given for lynching were "allegations of murder, burglary, arson, poisoning water and livestock, insulting whites, being insolent, and other perceived 'offenses,' and sometimes they were lynched on no charges at all"(29). These reasons were not very legitimate. The lynchings could have been handled in a different way as in a court and jury, not by a mob. The mob violence really attacked the African Americans to a point where they had no say in the doings. The people that were mistreated were men, women, and children. Ida B. Wells reported in A Red Record that "during a single year, 1892, 241 men, women, and children across 26 states were lynched. Of the 241, 160 people were identified as African Americans, which represented an increase of 200 percent over the ten-year period since 1882"( 10). This shows that at the time of Reconstruction, violence toward African Americans increased rapidly. Often, African Americans were lynched for odd reasons. Many African American men were lynched for alleged rape of white women even though they had been in a...