The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States

In these two chapters, Wells addresses common notions about capital punishment and explains how lynching fails to deliver on its promise. In Chapter 1, Wells asserts that the violence and brutality enacted by white people against Black citizens is unjustified and unbridled. The statistics shared in Chapter 2 outline the wide range of offenses that led to lynchings, including those that occurred for no offense at all. In Chapter 3, Wells details specific case studies, including two cases in which individuals with disabilities were murdered despite evidence that their lives posed little to no threat to the larger population. Wells utilizes Research and Testimony as Activism in these chapters, exposing the flaws in the logic of Lynch Law. She argues that the function of capital punishment is to remove the possibility of future violence and crime by eliminating a dangerous individual. By establishing the social precedent for capital punishment, she uses white testimonies and newspaper articles to expose that lynchings are not connected to the protection of public safety. In the cases of Hamp Biscoe and Henry Smith, capital punishment is applied without reason; it is the act of a reckless and bloodthirsty mob motivated by racist hatred.

Wells offers facts about both cases, and she rarely provides her own perspective on the details. Instead, she allows the research to speak for itself. By carefully outlining the reputations of both Biscoe and Smith, she shows that locals considered these men to be mostly harmless. Therefore, their murders are not about public safety; instead, they serve a larger purpose: Racist Violence as a Mechanism for Power. Biscoe’s crime was not the assault of a white man. Instead, his crime was that he dared to believe that he had a right to his own property, a right granted alongside full citizenship. White supremacists believed he should not be afforded the same rights as white people and that he had no claim over the property he held. As such, lynching was not only an attack on him but a warning to other Black Americans, using fear to maintain the racist hierarchy established by slavery.

Wells does not turn away from including records of Black citizens who did commit actual crimes, contributing to her reliability as a reporter. Instead, she emphasizes the nuances of the cases and the disparity between how Black citizens and white citizens are treated for the same crimes. Wells’s record affirms that Henry Smith did kill Vance’s four-year-old daughter in retaliation after being brutalized by Vance. Although it does not justify the murder of a child, it is important to consider Smith’s disability as a factor in his violence. Instead, 10,000 people gathered to watch a man, described by the local reverend as a man in desperate need of medical attention, be tortured and murdered:

I had known Smith for years, and there were times when Smith was out of his head for weeks. Two years ago I made an effort to have him put in an asylum, but the white people were trying to fasten the murder of a young colored girl upon him, and would not listen (46).

Here, the reverend reveals the irony of the argument that lynching is necessary to secure public safety. He had recognized the dangers of Smith’s untreated mental health condition and tried to help. Lynch Law, however, was more interested in putting an end to Smith’s life, independent of whether he deserved such a punishment. The crowd was able to enact the lynching because of Mob Mentality and White Immunity. The reverend carefully details the crowd’s frenzy and its reckless actions. When he begged the crowd to stop torturing Smith, he was attacked. Wells includes the brutal details of these lynchings to evoke pathos in her readers; by eliciting feelings of horror and revulsion, she hopes to inspire her audience to take action against these extrajudicial killings.