Wells rejected nonviolent suasion in favor of armed Black self-defense

Evidence

In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. “The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,” she declared, “the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 726

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the later civil-rights nonviolence narrative; also parallels Douglass- or earlier-sections treatments of self-defense vs. suasion.
• SEED: A profile piece on how the mainstream canon erased Wells’s armed-self-defense position in favor of uplift rhetoric.