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"This statement is not a shield for the despoiler of virtue, nor altogether a defense for the poor blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs. It is a contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic to demand that justice be done though the heavens fall.

It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The awful death-roll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling, not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race.

[[File:1200px-Postcard of the lynched Jesse Washington, front and back.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|Postcard of the Jesse Washington lynching. Note the back. Sender refers to the "barbecue."]]

Wells wrote these because one of the most common assertions—or justifications for lynchings—was rape. Fears about miscegenation, or race mixing, shrouded criticisms against the Republican party during the Civil War, and after, many Southern whites feared that black equality was simply a way to legalize miscegenation. Other white Southerners believed that slavery had tamed African-Americans’ bestial, animal nature by introducing them to white civilization. Outside of the institution of slavery, blacks were reverting to their savage tendencies.<ref>Gail Bederman, ''Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917'' p. 46-53.</ref>