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Author's Note – Ida B. Wells was a black woman who worked, wrote, and organized her whole life for a federal anti-lynching law, for women's suffrage, for the equal rights of both her race and gender. For all of that, she's one of my few (human) heroes. And there's no one better to read about at this time of year, between black history month and women's history month. Because she wrestled with both "isms" - racism and sexism, and all the tangled ways they were tied together for evil. And she called Christians to the struggle, investigating the true events about individual lynchings and publishing them, so no one could hide behind the bare face lies that were fogging up the culture!
Ida B. Wells was a remarkable woman. Between 1890 and her death in 1931, she traveled extensively and spoke boldly for many causes important to society, in general, and black people, in particular. She initiated the Negro Women’s Club Movement, was active in the early National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged the exclusion of blacks at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, started the first black women’s suffrage club, founded and administered a “reading room and social center” in the poorest part of Chicago’s black ghetto, and raised a family. However, she is best known for her anti-lynching activities.
Lynching
Wells’ first personal encounter with lynching occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, where she was writing and editing her newspaper, the "Free Speech." Three black men were lynched for defending their grocery store against some white men who owned a grocery store across the road. The death of these men proved a turning point in Wells’ thinking.
“Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching, that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.
But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart had been lynched in Memphis, one of the leading cities of the South... and they had committed no crime against white women. This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the n----- down.’ I then began an investigation of every lynching I read about.”
These investigations became the cornerstone of Wells’ anti-lynching work. She discovered that the accusation of rape was used to excuse crushing oppression of black peoples’ economic and political and social freedom. In three-quarters of cases, the victim was not even accused of rape. She determined to expose this lie of lynching, and did so – in print. Speech-making became another important tool in her work. Everywhere she went Wells spoke about the crime of lynching and the moral duty of Christians to protest it.
It is important to keep in mind the context in which Wells lived and acted. At the turn of the century (1800 to 1900), women had been actively “cleaning house” in the United States and England for some time. Abolitionism and the women’s movement brought women into the public arena for the sake of equal rights. The evangelical movements throughout the nineteenth century gave many women an avenue to take on such evils as alcohol, poverty, and social injustice. Wells both grew out of and contributed to this reform spirit. Perhaps the fact that she was a reforming woman in a time when such were tolerated made it possible to be heard widely on such delicate issues as race and sex.
The turn of the century was also a time when the suppression of black people had become reminiscent of slavery. Southern white democrats had thoroughly “won the peace” and took legal and social measures to reduce the freedoms gained by the ex-slaves. By 1890, black codes, disenfranchisement, and social segregation had become entrenched in Southern law and life. And in 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his famous Atlanta Compromise Address, reflecting the general understanding of many black people that silence or overt accommodation to white racism was the only way to survive such terrible times.
Ida B. Wells did not accept that understanding. In 1892, she was run out of Memphis for printing the facts of the lynchings of her friends there. In 1895 (the same year as Washington’s address), she published "A Red Record", her first catalog of the lynchings she investigated. In 1901, she chaired the Anti-Lynching Bureau of the National Afro-American Council. During this frightening time in American history, Wells was not quiet, but was forging very unaccommodating solutions to black peoples’ oppression.
To people who believed that white, patriarchal society had to be held tightly in place, any attempt of black people–-not just men–-to behave like equal citizens, was a rape. The three men in Memphis who protected their property by shooting the white trespassers were stepping outside of their prescribed role in Southern society. It was almost inevitable that Ida B. Wells would have to move North or be killed.
In the post-Civil War North, particularly among Christian reformers in America and in England, these definitions would not have been acceptable. Although few people would have proposed equal integration, most would have been obliged to denounce the killing of a person for writing an insulting editorial or protecting their business. But they did not know that “rape” was a code word in the South for black people behaving like equal citizens. Wells’ determined to expose this device.
Early Life
Ida Wells was born a slave in 1862. Her father was a carpenter who found plenty of work in battle worn Holly Springs, Mississippi, after the Civil War. Wells’ parents both valued education highly – as did most ex-slaves – and urged their children to attain one. Theirs was also a religious family. The only book Wells was allowed to read on Sunday was the Bible, which she did, over and over. Perhaps the Biblical prophets inspired some of her future courage.
When she was sixteen, both of Wells’ parents and three siblings died in a yellow fever epidemic, in 1878. This left her, the oldest daughter, to care for and raise her four brothers and sisters. She took her teachers’ examinations, passed, and took a teaching position to support her family.
The qualities and characteristics Wells acquired in her growing-up years were to stand her in good stead. She was intelligent, self-reliant, and independent. It was clear that she had developed a sure, personal sense of justice, as well. On her way to Woodstock, Tennessee (at age 22!), where she taught school while studying for the Memphis examinations, she was instructed by a train conductor to move from the first-class car to the smoking car. She refused. It required several men to remove her, after which she proceeded to sue the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. In 1884, the law required separate, but equal, traveling accommodations for blacks. However, the railroad had not been in the habit of providing first-class cars just for black people, but made them ride in the smoking car. The local court ruled in Wells’ favor, awarding her $500 damages. She was sadly disillusioned, however, when the railroad appealed and won the case before the Tennessee Supreme Court. She concluded that justice was not guaranteed through the courts. But the experience shows an early tendency in Wells to speak up and protest injustice rather than acquiesce.
In 1887 (at age 25), Wells began writing for her church newspaper in Memphis, where she was then teaching, and discovered an aptitude for journalism. By 1890, her pastor gave her half interest in, and full editing responsibilities for the "Free Speech and Headlight." When she was dismissed in 1891 by the Memphis School Board for criticizing them in print for the poor conditions of the segregated black schools, she began traveling through the South, selling subscriptions, appointing correspondents, and writing--slowly developing her editorial position into a full-time job. Because of her subscription drive and the support of the minister, the circulation of the "Free Speech" jumped from 1500 to 4000 in one year.
The black press was an important and potent tool for Wells. While black people knew firsthand of the injustices they experienced, and many black women were courageous and self-reliant, they did not have the means of communicating their views to 4,000 people. The white press took notice, too.
After Memphis
Wells relocated to Chicago, after a successful speaking tour of England in 1894, where she continued her investigations of lynchings. She repeatedly published lynching statistics, arranged according to the alleged crime, and only a small portion of those lynched were even accused of rape. She also met and married a well-known attorney, editor, and public official, Ferdinand Barnett, and purchased his newspaper, "The Chicago Conservator."
The reports that came back from England of Wells’ successful tour there, and her speeches in America, stimulated interest by Northern black women to organize and participate in her anti-lynching campaign. In 1909 at the National Negro Committee organizing meeting, Wells argued the need for federal action on lynching, thereby laying the groundwork for the extended NAACP anti-lynching campaign.
Later, in 1935, the Committee on Interracial Cooperation published the culmination of their study on lynching, which corroborated Wells’ revelations about the motives behind lynching. And in the 1930s, when Jessie Daniel Ames organized the Association of Southern (white) Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), further analysis was done based on Wells’ incisive exposure of racial and sexual dynamics in the South.
In "The Changing Character of Lynching", she writes:
"When from [white women’s] own investigations of lynchings, allegedly committed to protect Southern (white) womanhood, they found that they were used as the shield behind which their own men committed cowardly acts of violence against a helpless people, they took the only action they could. They pledged themselves to educate against lynching in the towns where they lived and to publish by word of mouth the facts about women and lynching.”
The impact of Wells’ investigations, articles, speeches, analysis, and courage has been felt well into our own generation via these later organizations who joined her anti-lynching crusade. And though no federal law against lynching was passed because of determined resistance of Southern (white) senators, her ethics and savvy methods were vital in many of the struggles for civil rights. She demonstrated her own advice to black people:
“Nothing is more definitely settled than [Afro-Americans] must act for ourselves. I have shown how [we] may employ the boycott, emigration, and the press, and I feel that a combination of all these agencies can effectually stamp out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery.”
Further Information:
Crusade for Justice, Ida B. Wells autobiography, published by her daughter, Alfreda Duster, 1970
Southern Horrors. Lynch Law in All Its Phases, Ida B. Wells, 1892
A Red Record, Ida B. Wells, 1895
Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States. 1889-1918, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1919
The Tragedy of Lynching, Arthur Raper, 1933
The Mob Still Rides. Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1935
The Changing Character of Lynching, Jessie Daniel Ames, 1942
Revolt Against Chivalry, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, 1979
The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950. Robert Zangrando, 1980
And look for a new biography, due out next month, by Paula Giddings,
Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
News Article by Sheryl Olsen
contact the author at sherylolsen@comcast.net |
