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From The “Threadbare Lie” to Hate Crime Hoaxes
Another look at the Jussie Smollett conviction
In the 1890s white mobs lynched dozens of black men for raping white women. Investigative journalist Ida B. Wells discovered a lot of these rape accusations covered up consensual sex.
Wells published her findings in the newspaper she co-owned in Memphis, Tennessee, and concluded, “Nobody in this section of the country believes that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”
Days later Wells’s newspaper office was burned down because she insulted the sanctity of white womanhood. White mobs sought to lynch Wells, forcing her to relocate.
In exile, Wells published her famous pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in which Wells provided detailed accounts of the relationships between black men and white women and the false accusations that stirred “leading white men” into a lynching frenzy. The “leading white men” refused to accept there were white women that chose to be intimate with their “inferior counterparts”. Their refusal led to the creation of the most demonizing stereotype in American history, that of the sex-crazed black brute who raped white women on…