Ida B. Wells: "Employ the Boycott, Emigration, and the Press"

A 1926 fundraising poster by the NAACP that takes Wells' advice in the publication of the horrors the black community experiences.

The original publication of Wells pamphlet, distributed by the black newspaper The New York Age in 1892.

Working as an investigative journalist regarding mob violence in the United States, Ida B. Wells published her findings in the 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, which served both as a journalistic piece that elucidates the terrible nature of the lynchings and as a proposal to rescue the black community from continued oppression through unlawful murder that goes unpunished. Wells concludes from her research that the correct reaction and opposition to the lynch laws is one that is uniquely black. By using the sheer numbers of black people in Southern states Wells urges the community to remove themselves from the white machine of capital. Channeling the communal power used before to elect over 1500 public officials, the millions of black people do have the power to fight the institutions of segregation and oppression in a meaningful way: by both seceding from their part of white hegemonic interests and publicizing the oppressive systems and actions against the black community.