Ida B. Wells Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.

Ida B. Wells
Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

Ida B. Wells
There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.

Ida B. Wells
The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American.

Ida B. Wells
Nobody in this section of the country believes in the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves, and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

Ida B. Wells
I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.

Ida B. Wells
During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul.... While slaves were scourged mercilessly. the white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars.. But Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro's body were lost.

Ida B. Wells
The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

Ida B. Wells
The Negro has suffered much and is willing to suffer more. He recognizes that the wrongs of two centuries cannot be righted in a day, and he tries to bear his burden with patience for today and be hopeful for tomorrow.

Ida B. Wells
The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

Ida B. Wells
The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

Ida B. Wells
The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way towards proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.

Ida B. Wells
The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

Ida B. Wells
The Negro has been too long associated with the white man not to have copied his vices as well as his virtues.

Ida B. Wells
Nothing is more definitively settled than he [the Black American] must act for himself. He may employ the boycott, emigration, and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all of these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery. "The gods help those who help themselves."

Ida B. Wells
The only excuse which capital punishment attempts to find is upon the theory that the criminal is past the power of reformation and his life is a constant menace to the community.

Ida B. Wells
Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect.

Ida B. Wells
Our watchword has been "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. Neither do brave men or women stand by and see such things done without compunction of conscience, nor read of them without protest.

Ida B. Wells
The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe punishment, but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public sentiment demands and sustains such action.

Ida B. Wells
Since the appetite grows for what it feeds on, the desire came to own a paper.

Ida B. Wells
Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

Ida B. Wells
The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased.

Ida B. Wells
I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.

Ida B. Wells
The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.

Ida B. Wells
The white man's victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder.

Ida B. Wells
In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.

Ida B. Wells
There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice if we only know how to find it.

Ida B. Wells
The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Ida B. Wells
One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.

Ida B. Wells
The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival,

Ida B. Wells