In “Southern Horrors,” Wells made clear that white men perpetrated sexual violence against black women, while black men were brutalized by white mobs for having consensual sex with white women. And by showing that only about 30 percent of the black victims of lynch mobs had actually been accused of rape, Wells challenged the idea that lynchings resulted from it.

She argued that the portrayal of black men as rapists put them “beyond the pale of human sympathy.” And she suggested that such a focus concealed the rape of black women. And it gave cover to whites’ violent efforts to rob African-Americans of their rights.

Drawing attention to the sexual crimes of white men, she noted that chivalry “can hope for little respect from the civilized world when it confines itself entirely to the women who happen to be white.” Wells uncovered the long history of white men raping black women. “Not one who reads the record as it is written in the faces of the million mulattos in the South,” she wrote, “will for a minute conceive that the Southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstance placed in his power.”

Wells’s genius lay in her ability to flip the script, casting white Southern men as the lustful rapists of black women and the hypocritical murderers of innocent black men. Alone, she was not able to stop lynching. But with the help of other black women, she did put mob violence on the reform agenda and brought to light the rape of black women.

Yet when most Americans remember Wells, they remember her solely as a campaigner against lynching. We hear little of the woman who linked economic exploitation, lynching and sexual violence. Erased is the person who believed that lynching was a way to control white women’s sexuality, especially those who had sexual relationships with black men. Gone is the radical feminist who insisted on women’s rights to sexual justice and equal protection.

A history of lynching must remember black women like Eliza Woods. It should recognize that the rape of black women devastated communities. And it ought to highlight how black women organized against rape and lynching. Anything less prevents one of the most radical movements for racial and sexual justice from speaking to the many challenges of our time.

The memorial and museum in Montgomery are long overdue. And they represent a call to action that begins with an acknowledgment of hidden truths.