As owner and reporter for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight Ida B. Wells investigated numerous accounts of lynching that resulted from allegations of the rape of White women by Black men. She concluded that such allegations were fabrications used to justify extrajudicial executions that served to terrorize the Black community and that the accompanying hysteria was a way to conceal the real underlying motives of stifling Black political and economic progress, enforcing the second-class status of Blacks, and limiting the potential threat of competition and loss of power. She turned the narrative upside down, casting the alleged rapists as “poor, blind Afro-American Samsons” who were the victims of devious, mendacious “White Delilahs”. The term “Black Samson” and the use of the story as metaphor derives from an 1865 poem by Longfellow called “The Warning”, which casts the post-Civil War Black male as an “instrument of vengeance and a cause of ruin”. The term “instrument of vengeance” also appears in “The Confessions of Nat Turner”, an 1831 account of a Virginia slave revolt. She published her findings in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases in 1892. The failure of the federal government to intervene was interpreted as supportive of the efforts by the Southern states to deny free African Americans the basic rights and freedoms enjoyed by other Americans. Her work was published by Black-owned newspapers throughout the county, which led to the destruction of her office and presses and her move to Chicago. Thankfully, the work survives.

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