“the lawless lynchings in the South for alleged crimes against the whites are, ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, simple outrages against our race”

The Freeman was the first American Black illustrated newspaper. This rare issue incudes a half-column report of a speech by Ida B. Wells, the celebrated Black investigative journalist and sociologist, and civil and women’s rights leader. Wells is famous for, among other things, her anti-lynching campaigns. In 1893 and 1894 she toured Great Britain in a successful effort to gain the white support she could not achieve in America. This newspaper reports on Wells’s talk at New York’s Bethel A.M.E. on her return from England. She declares in part,

“We want the colored race to be places in the proper light before the people of this country,” Miss Wells concluded, “for there is in literature no true type of the negro as he is today. The lawless lynchings in the South for alleged crimes against the whites are, ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, simple outrages against our race. The press is in control of the whites, and the attacks upon us are colored to suit themselves. The colored people of this country should organize themselves from one end of the country to the other. They should at least contribute the sinews of war with which to fight the battle. The South knows that we are very much disorganized. It is our duty to see that every story published from the South, in which a negro is accused of some fiendish act and lynched for it, is run down by our own detectives, if necessary, and the other side of it published. There are two sides to every lynching.”

The frontpage features an elaborate masthead depicting a Black Liberty figure, broken free of her chains, a blacksmith at work, a woman playing piano, a large college building, and open books. This issue includes large engraved portraits of men speaking at the upcoming National Negro Democratic Conference including T. McCants Stewart, J. Milton Turner, and Peter H. Clark, and others.

$4,500