Ida B. Wells Barnett's The Red Record | Griots And Books

In 1895, Ida B. Wells-Barnett published The Red Record — a forensic dismantling of the lies used to justify lynching in the American South, built almost entirely from the lynchers' own newspapers and statistics. In this episode of Griots and Books, Aya Fubara Eneli Esq and Adesoji Iginla are joined by Ms Akeisha Johnson to go through Wells's argument: how the alibi for racial terror evolved from “riot prevention” to “anti-Black-suffrage terror” to the rape myth that still echoes today; how she proved, county by county, that most lynching victims weren't even accused of the crime used to justify the practice; and how her confrontation with white reformer Frances Willard exposed the limits of white feminist solidarity in the 1890s. We connect Wells's method, turning the oppressor's own record-keeping into an indictment, and ask what “the remedy” is Join us on Saturday, 27/6/2026, at 3 PM EST.