The Red Record

The Red Record is a work of nonfiction by Ida B. Wells-Barnett on lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Wells-Barnett was a leading African American journalist and activist, and she brings careful research and vivid storytelling together to lay out the brutal reality of racial violence.

The book draws on statistics and accounts of individual lynchings, and it examines the reasons commonly given to justify them. It formed part of her wider campaign against lynching, which began with her journalism in Memphis. It remains an important text in the literature of social justice.