Cassandra HemenwayBlack history is American history and should be studied year-round. But in the spirit of February’s designation as Black History Month, and in the context of the recent arrests of Black journalists and activists in Minnesota, I’m offering this article about investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, whose reporting drew international attention to lynching and racism in the United States starting in the 1890s.
About 130 years after Wells began reporting on lynching, and with decades of effort by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (which Wells co-founded), the U.S. Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2022, identifying lynching as a federal hate crime.
Fast forward three years: on New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31, 2025, an off-duty ICE officer fatally shot Keith Porter, a 43-year old Black man who witnesses say shot a rifle into the air outside his Los Angeles apartment. Then, this January, federal agents shot and killed two white Minnesota protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both attempting to protect neighbors from ICE and Border Patrol’s brutality.
Others have died in ICE’s detention facilities this January, including Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos, according to The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times.
The U.S. Department of Justice also targets the storytellers, recently arresting two Black journalists, former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent Twin Cities journalist Georgia Fort, after they both covered a protest at Cities Church in Minneapolis, according to the Minnesota Reformer.
Also reported in the Reformer: “U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that two others were also arrested at her direction in connection with the protest: Black Lives Matter activist Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy, who works as a lobbyist for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and is a Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate for state Senate.”
And, Mother Jones reported that in those arrests, the DOJ, apparently without irony, “invoked a federal felony statute from the Reconstruction Era, designed to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to do things like worship and vote amid terror and violence from the Ku Klux Klan.”
If that weren’t gas-lighty enough, Mother Jones noted, too, that Lemon and Fort reportedly face “charges of violating the FACE Act, or the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, which was created to protect people trying to obtain or provide reproductive health services from violent or disruptive protestors. A section in that law also protects worshipers in religious spaces.”
All of this likely would have not surprised Ida B. Wells, who spent a lifetime exposing lynchings and the various ways the government used laws and policies to allow them. These present-day parallels to Wells’ time bring a visceral understanding of her courage, and that of those doing similar work now.
—Cassandra Hemenway, Editor in Chief
