War & Peace Quote by Ida B. Wells

Wells isn’t offering a slogan here; she’s issuing a forensic conclusion drawn from a country that treated Black vulnerability as civic entertainment. The line is shaped like a statistic, blunt enough to feel inevitable: “only times,” “got away,” “has been.” That grammar matters. It strips sentimentality and dares the reader to argue with her evidence rather than her tone. In an era when white newspapers laundered lynching into “justice” and courts routinely refused to prosecute white mobs, Wells frames survival itself as the rare outcome that needs explaining.

The shock is in how she flips the moral script. Self-defense, typically positioned as an individual right, becomes in her account a last-resort technology of citizenship. “Assaulted” is doing heavy work too: it nods to the everyday reality of racial terror without letting the reader hide behind the euphemisms of “riot” or “misunderstanding.” “Got away” implies escape, not victory; the bar is not equality, it’s living to see tomorrow.

Contextually, Wells was writing against the lynching regime of the late 19th century, when allegations (especially of sexual impropriety) were weaponized to justify extrajudicial murder and to police Black economic and political gains. The subtext is a cold indictment: when the state will not protect you, it effectively deputizes your aggressors. Her sentence refuses the comfort of believing violence is an aberration. It’s policy by other means, and she’s naming the one circumstance in which that policy occasionally fails.