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Southern Horrors Essay

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Southern Horrors Paper

The power for a single person to vastly affect the world around them is a rare and special talent. Ida B. Wells took it upon herself to positively influence the world she lived in. With every possible obstacle in her way she found a way to work through them and accomplish extraordinary achievements. As an African American equal rights activist in 1892, she spoke through her pen to send a strong message of egalitarianism to the world. During the post reconstructions era racial tensions reached their peak as lynching became more prominent. Lynching is a form of brutal capital punishment, usually as result of mob violence without the benefit of due process resulting in a hanging. Ida was a monumentally dominant figure in the anti-lynching campaign, as well as committees for anti-lynching that were formed to raise awareness of lynching not only as a problem in the United States but as a national issue. After the emancipation of the slaves, the whites felt as if they lost control over what was theirs and as a result used extreme force to express their dissatisfaction. In turn, the African Americans’ situation did not improve after the emancipation due to the fact that the whites no longer had a stake in their survival and still had a fierce hatred towards their race. Massive amounts of African Americans were lynched for little to no reason at all. Ida made a valiant effort to better the world through facts, reason, and logic; the power of one unlikely person was able to act as the voice of reason in a nation that was under the influence of racial injustice. In the South, it was unheard of for an African American woman to speak out against racial injustices. Ida was a woman of great bravery, she spoke her mind to the fullest and went as far as to publish her work for the world to read. Her literature was written in such a way that could not

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