Frederick Douglass wrote an article explaining three eras of Southern barbarism and the excuses that coincided with each. Wells-Barnett goes into detail about each excuse:
The first excuse that Wells explains is the “necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged ‘race riots.’” Once the Civil War ended, there were many riots supposedly being planned by blacks; whites panicked and resisted them forcefully.
The second excuse came during the Reconstruction Era: blacks were lynched because whites feared “Negro Domination” and wanted to stay powerful in the government. Wells-Barnett encouraged those threatened to move their families somewhere safe.
The third excuse was: Blacks had “to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women.” Wells-Barnett explains that any relationship between a white woman and a black man was considered rape during that time period. In this article she states, “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.”