The Red Record (Summarized Edition). Enriched edition. Exposing Lynching: African American history, firsthand reports, and activist analysis to spark political change in 19th-century America

First published in 1895, The Red Record is Ida B. Wells-Barnett's uncompromising investigation of lynching in the post-Reconstruction United States. Mining court notices, eyewitness accounts, and annual tallies from papers like the Chicago Tribune, she assembles tables and case summaries that reveal economic rivalry, political repression, and sexual policing beneath the rhetoric of "protecting womanhood." The style fuses ledgers' precision with a orator's moral clarity, placing the pamphlet within Black protest print culture while pioneering a data-driven model of investigative journalism.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and trained as a teacher, Wells became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech. The 1892 lynching of her friends at People's Grocery radicalized her, and the destruction of her press forced exile to the North. From Chicago and on British lecture tours, she expanded her archive, worked with Frederick Douglass, and, in marrying attorney-editor Ferdinand L. Barnett, consolidated networks that sustained the painstaking compilation and argument of The Red Record.
Readers of history, journalism, and law will find this brief but formidable book indispensable: it teaches how evidence punctures myth and how prose can move publics. For courageous clarity and methodological foresight, few works reward attention more. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable-distilled, never diluted.
Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.