The very first thing I would like to draw attention to in both of the wordclouds are the two largest words in each of the visualizations: Rape and Murder. The fact that these two words are the largest in each of the wordclouds means that those who were lynched were most frequently accused of having committed one of these two crimes.
What does this tell us about the white public’s outlook on African-Americans?
It shows us that whites thought of blacks in the worst possible manner. Murder and rape can be considered two of the worst crimes a person could ever commit — this is pretty unanimous across Western cultures. By accusing African-Americans who were lynched of these two crimes shows that whites thought of blacks as sexual predators, criminals, and incredibly dangerous.
Consider the film The Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915. This film portrays a black man as a sexual predator who tries to cross racial lines and forcefully marry (and procreate with) a young white girl. The young girl throws herself off of a cliff and kills herself rather than be raped by a black man. Shortly thereafter, the black man is caught and lynched as punishment. However, cases of African-American men being murderous sexual predators are not actually founded in truth. It was just a fear and image that was projected onto them by racist, small-minded white people. I bring this film up because it came out only two decades after Wells released The Red Record. It is also proof of the way that African-American men were viewed by whites, and why they were being accused of such heinous crimes during the 1893 and 1894 lynchings.
I would also like to point out how large the words “alleged” and “attempted” are. In both 1893 and 1894 either one or both of these words were roughly the third or fourth largest in the wordcloud. This is significant because it backs up Ida B. Wells’s claims that the people who were being lynched were being lynched for no reason other than control. “Alleged” means that a person was accused of a crime, but there is no direct proof to back up the claim. According to the wordcloud, “alleged” comes up more frequently than just about any other word other than rape and murder. This would mean that many of the crimes the lynching victims supposedly committed were in fact, made up and without direct proof or evidence that the incident ever occurred.
Therefore, the lynchings were occurring for made up reasons, and presumably, to intimidate the newly freed African-American population of the United States. Whites were using the lynchings as a way to control the black population and segregate the races. These senseless murders and crimes (and lack of prosecution of the wrongdoers) made African-Americans fear for their lives every day. They had to “walk on glass” around white people, look away, and preferably just stay away, otherwise their lives might have been in danger.