Gain insight into the life of Ida B. Wells as Southern Horrors and Other Writings illustrates how events like yellow fever epidemic transformed her into a internationally famous journalist, public speaker, and activist at the turn of the twentieth century.

Reproduction of the original: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

The epidemic of lynching that gripped the American South in the decades after the Civil War and the end of slavery has been glossed over and understated in many history books. Activist Ida B. Wells took it upon herself to document this shameful practice and its prevalence throughout the region and, to a lesser extent, the entire country in a series of seminal volumes, including Southern Horrors.

Ida B. Wells was an African American woman who achieved national and international fame as a journalist, public speaker, and community activist at the turn of the twentieth century. In this new edition Jacqueline Jones Royster sheds light on the specific events, such as the yellow fever epidemic, that spurred Wells’s progression towards activism. Wells’s role as a public figure is further explored in the newly included excerpt from Wells’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice, which focuses on a crucial moment in her campaign, her first British tour, when Wells gained leverage in pushing lynching to a higher level of attention nationally and internationally. As Wells’s writings continue to play a key role in understanding both complex race relations and peace and justice as global concepts, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record have been retained in the second edition. Features such as a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included to aid students’ understanding of the historical context and significance of Ida B. Wells’s work.

The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women’s rights pioneer Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks’s courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells’s career, and—when hate crimes touched her life personally—she mounted what was to become her life’s work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured international attention. This volume covers the entire scope of Wells’s remarkable career, collecting her early writings, articles exposing the horrors of lynching, essays from her travels abroad, and her later journalism. The Light of Truth is both an invaluable resource for study and a testament to Wells’s long career as a civil rights activist. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.