WEEK 1: STUDY GUIDE



History 7, Fall 2016

Professor Borses

Study Guide 3

Topic: Life in the Jim Crow South

Specific themes: In this class session we will study the system of Jim Crow segregation that took hold in the U.S. South at the end of the war, the structures of violence that undergirded that segregation, and African American resistance to those structures.

Reading/Writing assignment for this week:

Primary Source: Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors” (download)



Part 1: BROAD QUESTIONS Use these questions to consider the big ideas of the readings. Some questions may have more than one right answer, but the best responses will draw on specific information from the readings and/or lectures for support.

1) As a “public woman,” Ida B. Wells can be viewed as unusual among nineteenth-century women. What makes her so?

2) Wells made a point of using data from white newspapers to support her claims about mob violence. What was the advantage in the use of this strategy?

3) What does “Southern Horrors” suggest about the conditions and challenges that confronted Africa Americans? Women? African American women? What does it suggest about notions of race and gender in the late-nineteenth century?

4) Why did the accusation of rape make an effective excuse for mob violence? On what grounds did Wells claim these acts of violence to be unlawful?

5) What solutions did Wells offer to the problem of mob violence and lynching? Do you think these solutions were responsible for the decline of such violence in the twentieth century?

Part 2: IDENTIFICATIONS: (be able to identify each term in a sentence and then provide a few sentences describing its SIGNIFICANCE in terms of the themes of the course and week)

Ida B. Wells

“Southern Horrors”

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