The Quartet in the Political Persona of Ida B. Wells

Antilynching activism and advocacy are codified in Wells’s writings, particularly the 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Wells presented an astute political analysis of racial-sexual violence within US democracy that remains influential from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A review of Wells’s advocacy for Afro-American autonomy and self-defense to counter racial terror and rape, and her critique of the duplicity of antirape discourse that demonizes blacks, suggests that the legacy of Ida B. Wells is discernible in contemporary analysis and activism found in organizations such as Black Lives Matter and the Black Women’s Blueprint.