Songs Without Words

Browse Items (37 total)

  • Tags: images

"Miss Ida B. Wells"
Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells was a former Memphis schoolteacher and journalist. In 1892, as co-owner of the Memphis newspaper Free Speech, Wells exposed the lies regarding the lynching of the three African American men. She urged her readers…

"John Mitchell, Jr."
John Mitchell, Jr., was a newspaper editor, amateur illustrator and political leader in Richmond, Virginia in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He began his career as the Richmond correspondent for the New York Freeman, and took over…

"Richmond Planet" banner
The Richmond Planetwas founded in 1883 by thirteen former slaves, in the city of Richmond, Virginia. This four page (sometimes eight page) weekly was an independent newspaper that focused on African American civil rights in the post-Reconstruction…

"Some Daily or Rather Nightly Occurrences in the South"
In the late summer of 1889, the Indianapolis Freemanused the figure of Uncle Sam to protest a Gouldsboro, Louisiana, massacre of African American families on an excursion, and the burning of a church, as a symbol of federal protection. In this image,…

"Ethiopia to Uncle Sam"
This drawing in the Indianapolis Freeman shows Uncle Sam standing impotently before a robed figure, Ethiopia, as she gestures toward the shooting of innocent African American men and women, and a burning church. “See how my people are murdered,…

"The Southern Outrages"
During the winter of 1889–1890, the killing of prisoners by a white mob in Barnwell, South Carolina, and a “race war” in Georgia, prompted the Indianapolis Freeman to unleash a more pointed visual critique of so-called southern…

"The Hercules of Today"
Indianapolis Freeman artists typically denounced racial discrimination and social inequality, and focused on presidential failures to stem racial violence. This frequently-repeated drawing, for example, showed an Atlas-like figure shouldering the…

"Our National Cemetery"
In this image, the Indianapolis Freeman depicts Uncle Sam as a gravedigger, tending the failed legislation of generations. A headstone for the recently-defeated “Blair Education Bill,” which would have supplied federal funding for local…

"Still Asleep"
When Frederick Douglass warned whites of the dangers of “reaping the whirlwind,” the Indianapolis Freeman recycled an oft-used drawing by the late political cartoonist, Henry J. Lewis, showing a sleeping African American Gulliver, a…

"Our Republic"
In this image, widely reproduced in the African American press, popular white political cartoonist Thomas Nast captured the outrage that followed the lynching of three African American men in Memphis, Tennessee a few months earlier--the incident that…
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