AGAINST
ALL ODDS
[Ida B.
Wells]
by Clarissa Myrick-Harris
From Smithsonian,
33 (July 2002), pp.70-77.
One September day in 1883, Ida B. Wells stepped aboard a train in Memphis. She was 21 and a
public school teacher. After she took a seat and opened a book to read, a
conductor demanded that she move to a car designated for black passengers. She
refused.
When the conductor grabbed her arm, Wells bit
his hand. Hard. "I had braced my feet against the
seat in front and was holding to the back," she would later recall.
"As he had already been badly bitten, he didn't try it again by
himself." Though she was no more than about five feet tall, it took three
men to roust her from the seat. Still, she refused to sit in the other car and
got off the train at the next stop.
Wells sued the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad in 1884 for
violating equal accommodation statutes--and, incredibly, won. But the Tennessee
Supreme Court overturned the verdict in a ruling that would lay the groundwork
for the "separate but equal" doctrine that kept racial segregation in
place for decades.
Her ordeal, with its intriguing parallels to Rosa Parks' civil disobedience
aboard a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, 72 years later, not only
reveals Wells' fierce will but also essentially launched her lifelong, often
dangerous struggle to secure the rights of African-Americans.
This fearless woman would do more than anyone to curtail the terrorizing of
blacks by lynch mobs. She would also publish a newspaper, help found a number
of African-American self-help organizations--including the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)--advance women s rights and run
for the Illinois Senate. Although she pioneered tactics that would become
crucial to the civil rights movement decades later, she is not nearly as well
known as contemporaries Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du
Bois. But that is changing.
.................................
After slavery ended in the United
States in 1865, Southern states enacted
several Jim Crow laws denying equality to African-Americans. White supremacist
groups such as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens. Racist ideology
dressed up as "science" depicted blacks as lascivious and inferior.
It was in this charged atmosphere that some of the most heinous crimes ever
committed in law officials themselves.
Lynching--the kidnapping, torturing and killing of men, women and children by
vigilante mobs--became commonplace. Between 188o and 1930, approximately 3,220
black Americans were reported lynched, along with perhaps 723 whites. The 1880s
ushered in a dramatic and prolonged rise in the percentage of African-American
victims. These lawless executions, blind to any constitutional guarantee of due
process, often attracted large crowds. Some spectators brought along children
and even picnic baskets, as though the horrific murder of another human being
constituted entertainment, or worse, edification. It was the brutal lynching of
a friend in 1892 that rallied Wells, then 29, to the antilynching cause.
By then, Wells had become a full-time
journalist. When a series of articles she had written about her court case
against the railroad was picked up by African-American newspapers across the
country (and eventually led to a column), Wells knew what she wanted to do with
her life. She bought part-ownership in the Free Speech, a black Memphis newspaper, and
became its coeditor. "She has plenty of nerve, and is as sharp as a steel
trap," said T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, a
leading black newspaper.
One of her closest friends was Thomas Moss, who owned a grocery store in Memphis with two other
black men. A white businessman, angered by competition from the new store, had
pressured town officials to close it down. When a scuffle broke out between
black and white youths near the black-owned store, he and other white residents
threatened to destroy it. After a group of white men marching toward the store
at night were fired upon and at least one was wounded, police rounded up and
jailed more than a hundred blacks. But Moss and his two partners were
"carried a mile north of the city limits and horribly shot to death,"
Wells wrote in Free Speech. A local white newspaper reported Moss'
last words: "Tell my people to go West--there is no justice for them
here."
The murders devastated Wells, who was godmother to the Mosses' daughter.
"The city of Memphis
has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he
dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival," she
wrote in an editorial. Echoing Moss' last words, Wells and other black leaders
encouraged black Memphians to leave the city, which, she said "will neither
protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but
takes us out and murders us in cold blood."
Thousands of blacks joined the "Exodusters" migrating to Oklahoma and
other points west. Wells urged those who remained to boycott streetcars and
white businesses. Railway officials, assuming that black passengers were
staying away out of a mistaken belief that the electric cars were hazardous,
pleaded with Wells to tell her followers the cars were safe. "Keep up the
good work," she told her readers.
Driven by anger and grief, Wells plunged into a wide-ranging investigation of
lynching in America,
documenting the circumstances of more than 700 incidents over the previous
decade. She traveled alone across the South to the spots where lynching parties
had shot, hanged and burned victims, taking sworn statements from witnesses,
scrutinizing records and local newspaper accounts, sometimes hiring private
investigators. She studied photographs of mutilated bodies hanging from tree
limbs and of lynchers picking over the bones and ashes of burned corpses.
Her findings would astonish many Americans, appall others and outrage white
supremacists. She aroused the strongest ire by venturing into the taboo realm
of sexuality. The excuse frequently used for the lynching of black men was that
they had raped white women. But her research showed that rape had never been
alleged in two-thirds of the lynchings, and when it was, the "rape"
was often alleged after a secret relationship was discovered or following
nothing more than a suggestive look. In one editorial, Wells dared suggest that
many of the white women had had consensual sex with the men.
Wells was en route to New York
when white newspapers reprinted the editorial. Vandals ransacked the Free
Speech offices, and fearing for his life, her coeditor fled the city.
Racist whites promised to lynch Wells if she returned. A Memphis paper, the Evening Scimitar, threatened
the editorial's author, whom the paper believed to be a man. "Tie the
wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake . . . brand him on the forehead
with a hot iron, and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of
tailor's shears." Wells, who had armed herself with a pistol after Moss'
lynching, vowed to die fighting. "I had already determined to sell my life
as dearly as possible if attacked," she would later write. "If I
could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little
bit."
T. Thomas Fortune met with Wells during her trip and convinced her to remain in
New York City.
There she parlayed the subscription list of the now-defunct Free Speech into
part-ownership of the New York Age, which published the findings of
her investigations. She also published a pamphlet, Southern Horrors:
Lynching in All Its Phases, for which renowned abolitionist Frederick
Douglass, then in his 70s, penned the preface. "Brave Woman!" he
wrote, "If American conscience were only half alive. . . a scream of
horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall
be read."
Her crusade gaining momentum, Wells toured Great Britain
in 1893 and 1894, speaking in packed churches and lecture halls. The
"sweet-faced" orator spoke with "singular refinement, dignity
and self-restraint," wrote a London
observer. "Nor have I ever met any agitator so cautious and unimpassioned
in speech. But by this marvelous self-restraint itself, she moved us all the
more profoundly."
She so impressed the Duke of Argyll, Sir John Gorst, that he became the
founding president of the London Anti-Lynching Committee, the first of many
such chapters in Great Britain and the United States. The London
membership included the archbishop of Canterbury,
members of Parliament and the editors of England's most prestigious papers.
On a dare by Southern papers in the United States
and to get at the truth about lynching in America,
Sir John and his committee visited the United States in the summer of
1894. The mere presence of the British visitors, who threatened a boycott of U.S. goods,
infuriated white Americans. Governor John [Peter] Altgeld of Illinois said
Southerners should retaliate by visiting Ireland "to stop the outrages
there."
As it happened, the British delegation was touring the States when a lynching
party killed six black men near Memphis.
"If Ida B. Wells had desired anything to substantiate the charges against
the south," noted an Ohio
newspaper, "nothing more serviceable could have come to hand." That
incident marked a sort of turning point. Even the Evening Scimitar, which
had called for lynching Wells herself two years before, now sounded contrite.
"Everyone of us is touched with blood guiltiness
in this matter," the paper editorialized.
Historian Philip Dray, author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown, a
history of lynching in America,
says Wells' work effected a deep change in racial thinking. "In an age
when blacks were written about almost exclusively as a problem," he says,
"she had established lynching as a practice in which whites were the
problem and blacks those in need of compassion and justice."
One tactic that made Wells effective, says historian Paula Giddings [a
professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith
College in Massachusetts], was that she persuaded
Northern and foreign investors that lynchings were a
form of anarchy, which was poison for economic development. This view
threatened investments earmarked for the South. Her calls for boycotts in the
South by the black labor force caused states that previously ignored lynchings to rethink their complacency.
Following Wells' campaign, the number of lynchings
went down, from a peak of 235 in 1892, to 107 by 1899, and antilynching
legislation was enacted in parts of the South. "She was responsible for
the first antilynching campaign in the United States,"
says Giddings. "And she started it almost single-handedly."
Wells was bon a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi
in the midst of the Civil War in July 1862. The child's first three years were
punctuated by the sound of gunfire and the frenzy of minor skirmishes,
according to Wells biographer Linda McMurry in To
Keep the Waters Troubled, published in 1998. The town was captured and
recaptured by opposing armies throughout the conflict, changing hands at least
59 times, writes McMurry.
Wells' father, Jim, was the son of an enslaved woman named Peggy and her white
owner. More privileged than some slaves, Jim was apprenticed out to learn
carpentry. After the war, he worked as a paid employee for the carpenter who
had taught him, but lost his job when he refused to vote for the Democratic
ticket of white supremacy. In a display of the grit that he evidently passed on
to his daughter, he opened his own business across the street from his former
employer. Ida Wells' mother, Elizabeth, was a cook, an "outspoken woman
who was constantly whipped and beaten as a slave," says playwright
Thompson. The reason she wasn't killed outright, he avers, is that "she
was known as the finest cook in the South."
Ida Wells' fearlessness, says Giddings, came in part from her father, a leader
of the local black community who attended political meetings in spite of an
ever-present threat of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Mississippi's Secretary of State during
Reconstruction, James Hill, was a family friend. In due course Holly Springs
became home to one of two blacks in the state senate.
Ida's forceful personality emerged at a young age. She was expelled from school
after a confrontation with the institution's president. It isn't known what the
fight was about, but as McMurry notes, "Ida's
fiery temper often got her into trouble." The greatest crisis of her young
life occurred when a yellow fever epidemic struck Holly Springs
in 1878 and killed both of her parents and her baby brother. Family friends
arranged to place her five surviving brothers and sisters in homes around the
county, but 16-year-old Ida vetoed the plan. She lengthened her skirts (to look
older) and got a job as a country schoolteacher, supporting her siblings on a
salary of $25 a month.
In 1881, she accepted a better-paying teaching position in Woodstock, Tennessee,
even as she dreamed of a more exciting career as a "journalist, physician
or actress." She studied elocution and drama at Fisk
University in Nashville--training that must have proved
helpful when she later took to the lecture circuit.
She was 32 and already a noted journalist and activist when she married in
1895. Frederick Douglass had recruited Wells and Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a
prosperous black attorney and publisher of The Conservator newspaper
in Chicago, to help write a pamphlet protesting
the exclusion of black participants from the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.
Barnett, as militant as Wells, was once jailed for telling an audience that America was a
"dirty rag" if it didn't protect all of its citizens. A widower with
two sons, Barnett soon proposed to Wells, who eventually agreed to marry him.
She persuaded Barnett, who was busy with his legal work, to sell The
Conservator to her. Journalism, she later wrote in her autobiography,
"was my first, and might be said, my only love." A few days after the
wedding, Wells took charge of the newspaper.
Typically ahead of her time, the new bride adopted a hyphenated last name,
Wells-Barnett. The couple had two daughters and two sons. For Wells, as for
many career women, balancing work and family was a challenge. Her friend,
suffrage leader (and spinster) Susan B. Anthony, chided Wells that "since
you have gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased."
But while Wells struggled daily with a sense of divided duty, she still managed
to speak at antilynching rallies and at women's club
conventions, even while nursing. In 1898, baby Herman went along on his
mother's five-week trip to Washington,
where she discussed lynchings with President William
McKinley and also lobbied Congress--unsuccessfully--for a national antilynching law.
Although Wells was probably the most prominent black female journalist and
activist of her era, she did not succeed Frederick Douglass as the acknowledged
leader of the African-American community after the "grand old man"
died in 1895. Today's scholars speculate why that was so. Giddings thinks it
was due mainly to her gender. Also, she spoke openly about sexuality and
murder--issues deemed unbecoming of a lady in the Victorian era. For African-American
women at the turn of the century, writes Patricia Schecter
in Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 progressive
reform "favored professional experts, well-funded national organizations,
and men."
And there's no question that Wells' militancy and fiery temperament worked
against her. She was unusually fierce and uncompromising in her devotion to her
ideals and she clashed with contemporaries along ideological lines. "Wells
stayed militant at a time when other leaders believed a moderate relationship
with the power structure was the most effective way of doing things," says
Giddings.
The person who had emerged to lead black America at the turn of the 20th
century was Booker T. Washington, the head of the Tuskegee Institute. He not
only urged blacks to improve their lives through blue-collar labor but also
proposed a compromise that would leave Southern blacks segregated and
disenfranchised. Wells criticized Washington's
accommodation policy, says Dorothy Sterling in Black Foremothers: Three Lives.
She lacerated him for urging blacks "to be first-class people in a
Jim Crow car" rather than "insisting that the Jim Crow car be
abolished." And when several blacks were killed by white rioters in North Carolina (following the murder of a black postmaster
and his infant son in South Carolina),
Wells charged McKinley with indifference and inaction. "We must do
something for ourselves, and do it now," she advocated. "We must
educate the white people out of their 250 years of slave history." Labeled
a hothead by both Washington and McKinley supporters, Wells found herself
spurned by the very organizations she had helped create.
In 1909, black and white organizers met in New York to choose a "Committee of
Forty" to shape the agenda for the emerging NAACP. When they voted down
Wells' motion to make lobbying for an antilynching
law a priority, she walked out. Fellow black activist WEB.
Du Bois, who thought Wells too radical and outspoken, scratched her name from
the committee. Wells was reinstated only after her supporters protested. But
she would never have an easy relationship with the NAACP. When its magazine,
The Crisis, published an article in 1912 about the people who campaigned
against lynching, Wells was not even mentioned.
Yet she was never down for long. In 1910, she had established the Negro
Fellowship League to assist poor black migrants streaming into Chicago from the rural South. She served as
the first black female probation officer in Chicago. In 1913, she organized what was
likely the first suffrage organization for black women in America. She
helped the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a key labor union, gain a
foothold in Chicago.
And she inspired black women across the country to organize--a movement that
gave rise to the National Association of Colored Women.
At least twice Wells tried to retire from public life, only to have new
injustices lure her back into the fray. At 59, she traveled from Chicago to Little
Rock, Arkansas, to
investigate the case of 12 black men on death row. The men, sharecroppers who
had organized a union, were convicted for conspiring to kill whites and steal
their land. After the inmates told Wells that they had been tortured, she
published a pamphlet that described their plight and distributed it throughout
the state. Officials later pardoned and freed all 12 prisoners.
At 67, saying she was tired of the "do-nothings" in politics, she ran
for the Illinois
state senate. She finished last but vowed to learn from the mistakes of the
campaign.
She devoted much of her remaining energy to an autobiography. "Our youth
are entitled to the facts of race history which only the participants can
give," she wrote in the preface. She stopped writing mid-sentence in what
would be the last chapter of her book. After a day of shopping, she complained
of feeling ill. Two days later, she lapsed into a coma; she died of kidney
disease on March 25, 1931.
Today, Wells is remembered as a social pioneer, a woman of many firsts--in
journalism and civil rights. But she's best known for her courageous and often
lonely battle against the scourge of lynching. "She had a vision of how to
execute that kind of struggle, not on moral grounds alone, but as a social
justice issue," says Without Sanctuary curator Joseph Jordan. "Her
methodology would not only be used throughout the antilynching
movement but also in the work of the NAACP and by the civil rights and human
rights activists that followed."
"The awful crimes that occurred in this country should not be
forgotten," says Tazewell Thompson. "They can still
happen today, as the lynching in Jasper, Texas
[of James Byrd in 1998] proves." But thanks in part to Wells, the
Byrd lynchers were not greeted by cheering crowds or
aided by lawmen. They were prosecuted.
No letter pleased Ida B. Wells more than the one she received from a Mississippi sharecropper
during her antilynching campaign. "The only
thing to offer you in your great undertaking [is] prayer," the man wrote.
"The words 'God bless her' is written here on
every acre of ground and on every doorstep and inside of every home."
###
Clarissa Myrick-Harris directs the Southern Black
Communities Oral
History Center
at Morris Brown
College in Atlanta, Georgia.