SOURCE: Collins, Patricia Hill. Introduction to On Lynchings, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, pp. 9-24. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2002.

In the following essay, an introduction to three of Ida B. Wells-Barnett's writings on lynching, Collins provides an overview of Wells-Barnett's activism and career and situates Wells-Barnett inside a feminist tradition.

The resurgence of scholarly interest in the long and productive career of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is long overdue. This reprint of Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans, three of Wells-Barnett's important works on lynching, makes important contributions to our understanding of Wells-Barnett's place within African American social and political thought. Within African American historiography, Wells-Barnett has long been remembered primarily as an activist, an irritant to W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, and similar African American intellectuals. Wells-Barnett was an activist, and an extremely effective one for her time. She...