Who Counts? Urgent Lessons from Ida B. Wells’s Radical Statistics

This essay focuses on Ida B. Wells’s rarely analyzed application of statistical thinking in her anti-lynching pamphlets. I show how assumptions about the self-evident nature of data diminish the significance of Wells’s hidden calculations. My essay contextualizes her methods in the larger history of social quantification and scientific racism to underscore the urgency and novelty of her use of statistics. Wells not only reframes existing lynching records to show Black Americans as victims of racial terrorism but develops a critical framework for analyzing and humanizing the data. By more closely examining her use of empirical and quantitative methods to study the sociocultural underpinnings of lynching, we can recognize more fully her significant contributions to sociological research on Black life and to intersectional social activism and resistance. Her work contains urgent lessons for our contemporary moment: a blueprint for a more just approach to racial data collection and analysis, or what we would today call “data justice.”