Chapter 1, "The Case Stated," gives Wells-Barnett's reasons for publishing the details of lynching and also her understanding of why lynching takes place. These two themes are closely related. Lynching, for Wells-Barnett, is an extension of the anti-Black violence that has been woven into the fabric of US society through centuries of slavery. "Beginning with the emancipation of the Negro," she writes,

the inevitable result of unbridled power exercised for two and a half centuries, by the white man over the Negro, began to show itself in acts of conscienceless outlawry. During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body.

After slavery, the violence that had previously been restrained by white masters' economic interests was no longer restrained and, inevitably, emerged in full force. The result was mob violence against Black individuals and communities, which persisted through the second half of the nineteenth century.

Wells-Barnett's thesis in chapter 1 is that rather than proceeding from a particular cause, this anti-Black violence was an existing social fact that needed to be explained. It can be periodized based on which excuses White southerners used to justify it. During the first period, which stretched from 1865 to 1872, White people largely cited potential Black insurrections, which, they said, needed to be violently put down.

Then, from 1872 to the suppression of reconstruction governments after 1877, the Black vote allowed White people to raise the specter of "negro domination" (government of White people by the Black majority). Finally, after reconstruction, lynching entered what was, for Wells-Barnett, its contemporary phase: anti-Black violence justified by the accusation that Black men were rapists from whom White women needed to be protected.

Wells-Barnett notes the inconsistency of this accusation. If Black men really were so dangerous, why didn't White men raise the alarm before, when White women were more vulnerable, during the Civil War (when White women were left at home by White men who went to fight for the confederacy, often in the care of Black slaves) and Reconstruction (when White women often came to live in the South, far away from their homes and families, to serve as school teachers)?

Wells-Barnett notes that the accusation of sexual violence on the part of Black men against White women was only raised at the moment that it was most convenient for one group: White men, who needed to justify their continued murder of Black people.

Wells-Barnett sets up her book, then, not only to document the horrors of lynching but also to give lie to these excuses by documenting it as a consistent reality. White rhetoric changes. What stays the same is the actions of the lynchers. The only hope, Wells-Barnett argues, is to expose lynching for what it is—to let "the record" speak for itself.

The main idea of Chapter 1: THE CASE STATED is the setting forth of the conditions of the "system of anarchy and outlawry" that was markedly entered into in the United States beginning in the year 1894.

This anarchy and outlawry is specifically the crimes of white Southern men against the freed Southern slaves, no longer slaves after the Congressional legalization of complete freedom, followed by enfranchisement (authorization to vote in local, state and federal elections). Specifics of these crimes are murders, including lynchings, and torture, "whipped, scourged, exiled, shot and hung," and disappropriation of property.