Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases is a pamphlet which documented research on a lynching. Having examined many accounts of lynching based on the alleged "rape of white women," Wells-Barnett concluded that Southerners concocted rape as an excuse to hide their real reason for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks, but also their ideas about black inferiority.
