HELEN CARR highlights events that took place in October in history
26 OCTOBER 1892 Ida B Wells publishes her research into lynching
The horrors of racist murders are revealed
Extrajudicial killings, predominantly of black men by white mobs, were a horrific scourge of the US South in the 19th century. Such episodes were widely decried in the north – but still they continued.
One woman was determined to publicise and end these racist murders. Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, Ida B Wells became a pioneering journalist and civil rights leader. Investigating the appalling litany of lynching cases, she noticed that many were ‘revenge crimes’ perpetrated after the alleged rapes of white women. She also saw that many such claims were false, used by white southerners to justify violence against black men. The real reasons for such attacks ranged from envy of economic progress by black people to simple racist aggression.
Wells published her groundbreaking research on 26 October 1892 in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, launching a large-scale campaign against lynching. She travelled widely, and visited Britain in 1893 and 1894, hoping to gain support from British progressives. In her homeland she was slandered as a “nasty minded Mulatress”, but she succeeded in raising awareness in the post-emancipation US. Finally, in 2020 she posthumously received a Pulitzer Prize for her courageous crusade.
4 OCTOBER 1535
The Coverdale Bible – the first complete Bible in English – is published, adding to William Tynedale’s New Testament of 1525. In 1536, Tynedale will be executed for heresy.
13 OCTOBER 1269 Edward the Confessor moves to a splendid new shrine
Henry III’s rebuilt Westminster Abbey is finally consecrated
Westminster Abbey was a sensory overload on 13 October 1269, bursting with the sounds, smells and colours of song, incense and regalia. This day was designed to mark the crowning moment – if not the end – of a project that had dominated much of the life of Henry III: the consecration of his new Westminster Abbey, rebuilt to honour the cult of his predecessor, Saint Edward the Confessor.
That pious king had founded a great abbey near London, dedicated in 1065 just before his death. Henry wanted to stamp his mark on the site, and in 1245 work began on a huge new Gothic structure – the focal point of which wou
