Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’’s Interrogation of American Terror

In an increasingly globalized economy, Sims argues that Ida B. Wells s fight against lynching is a viable option to address systemic forms of oppression. More than a century since Wells launched her anti-lynching campaign, an examination of her work questions America s use of lynching as a tool to regulate behavior and the manner in which public opinion is shaped and lived out in the private sector. Ethical Complications of Lynching highlights the residual effects of lynching as a twenty-first century moral impediment in the fight to actualize ethical possibilities.

ANGELA D. SIMSis Assistant Professor of Ethics and Black Church Studies at the Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.