Introduction‪.‬

"El Clamor Publico was a public defender speaking out against unfair administration, the manipulation of juries, corrupt practices, and the prejudiced application of the law. It also sought to inform and instruct the Mexican people on civics as well as the basics of statute and emigration law.... [Francisco] Ramirez loudly and frequently stated that though life had been poorer, matters were a lot better off before 1848 and he used a phrase that would not be heard again, this land is our land." (Juan Gomez-Quinones) Christopher Waldrep based much of the research for his influential 2002 book, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, on newspaper accounts of lynching and cast the racial aspects of such mass violence as primarily a black and white phenomenon. He credits African American activists and journalists such as Ida B. Wells for developing an awareness that led the U.S. Senate to declare in 2005 that "lynching succeeded slavery as the ultimate expression of racism in the United States following Reconstruction." It was the African American journalists of the 1880s and 1890s who "persuaded Americans to think of lynching as racial."