Ida B. Wells Publishes 'Mob Rule in New Orleans,' Documenting Pattern of Anti-Black Violence

Ida B. Wells published 'Mob Rule in New Orleans' in 1900, documenting the Robert Charles case and the white mob violence that followed in meticulous detail. The pamphlet was part of her ongoing effort to document that lynching was not about protecting white womanhood but was economic and political terrorism. Her three major anti-lynching pamphlets — 'Southern Horrors' (1892), 'A Red Record' (1895), and 'Mob Rule in New Orleans' (1900) — constituted the most comprehensive empirical documentation of lynching's true character and represented a foundational work of investigative journalism.