Modern Far-Right Terrorism Is a Repeat of Reconstruction-Era Themes

In A Red Record, civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells recounts the story of a lynching near Selma, Alabama, in which a young Black farmworker developed a consensual relationship with a white daughter of the household, and eventually fathered a child. Taken from jail, the man, Daniel Edwards, was hanged and his body filled with bullets. According to a contemporaneous dispatch, “Upon his back was found pinned this morning the following: Warning to all [N-words] that are too intimate with white girls.