The Social Construction of Gender and Lynching

Abstract

To lynch, regardless of the techniques employed, is to use terror or the threat of torture as a control mechanism. To question this practice of unmitigated denial of due process can be construed as a willingness to die for what one believes. It is quite possible that Ida B. Wells expected to encounter opposition when she questioned the veracity that “Southern apologists justify their savagery on the ground that Negroes are lynched only because of their crimes against women.”¹ Her assessment about lynchings ascribed to black men’s interactions with white women antagonized Memphis’s leading white citizens.