Black Women Lynched: Mary Turner and Predecessors 1880s-1890s

Ida B. Wells documented multiple Black women lynched during the 1880s and 1890s. In A Red Record she listed cases including a woman in Jackson, Tennessee, hanged in 1886, and others across the South. Wells confronted the fiction that lynching was about protecting white women by documenting that Black women — who could not be accused of rape — were also murdered by mobs, proving the system was about racial terror and control.