five
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
1862–1931
1862 (July 16): Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
1865 (May 4): Confederate forces surrender; Wells family freed.
1867–75: Reconstruction period in Mississippi.
1877: Compromise of 1877; federal troops withdraw from the South.
1870s: Attends Rust College, later known as Shaw University.
1878 (Sept. 26–27): Father, mother, and brother Stanley die in yellow fever epidemic.
1878–79: Begins teaching near Holly Springs.
1879: Moves to Memphis; takes teaching job ten miles outside city.
1880–81: Sister Eugenia dies.
1883 (Sept.): Ejected from railroad ladies’ car.
1884: Starts teaching in Memphis; begins writing under pen name “Iola.”
1885 (Dec.): Wins damages from suit against railroad; loses appeal in 1887.
1886 (Jan.): Starts demanding payment for articles.
1887 (Aug.): Becomes a journalistic sensation; travels to National Colored Press Association in Louisville, Kentucky.
1888: Writes “The Model Woman,” an account of Victorian-era womanhood.
1889: Under pen name, Iola, becomes known as “Princess of the Press.”
1889 (June): Becomes part owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, later shortened to Free Speech.
1889 (Sept.): Founding of Iola Literary Club in her honor.
1891: Loses job as a teacher; becomes full-time journalist.
1891 (Sept.): Becomes half owner of the Free Speech after white backlash against anti-lynching editorial forces co-owner Taylor Nightingale to flee.
1892 (Mar. 5–6): Shoot-out at People’s Grocery.
1892 (Mar. 9): Group of Memphis whites lynch Thomas Moss and two others.
1892 (May 21): Free Speech publishes Wells’s editorial insisting that rape is usually a “threadbare lie” used to justify lynching black men.
1892 (May 27): White mob descends on and destroys Free Speech offices; Wells’s co-owner J. L. Fleming flees town after death threats.
1892 (June): Facing death if she returns to Memphis, stays in New York and joins the New York Age.
1892: Uses Age platform to attack lynching. Publishes Southern Horrors: The Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Gives first public speeches.
1893: Delivers anti-lynching lectures across US. Makes first visit to England. Relocates to Chicago.
1894: Hectic travel and lecturing schedule, including second visit to England.
1895 (Feb.): Famed abolitionist and Wells’s mentor Frederick Douglass dies.
1895: Publishes A Red Record, detailing statistics and excuses for lynchings.
1895 (June 27): Marries Ferdinand Barnett in Chicago; hereafter known as Wells-Barnett.
1896: Supreme Court affirms legalized segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson.
1896 (Mar. 25): Gives birth to first child, Charles.
1896 (July): Participates in founding of National Association of Colored Women.
1897 (Nov.): Gives birth to second son, Herman.
1898: Visits Washington, DC, to lobby President McKinley and others.
1899: Publishes Lynch Law in Georgia.
1900: Publishes pamphlets Mob Rule in New Orleans and Lynch Law in America.
1901: Daughter Ida born.
1904 (Sept.): Gives birth to fourth child, Alfreda.
1904: Founds Frederick Douglass Center in Chicago.
1905: Wells-Barnett and husband join W. E. B. DuBois’s Niagara Movement.
1909 (Nov.): Investigates Cairo, Illinois, lynchings of William James and a white photographer.
1910 (May 25): Helps organize National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
1910: Establishes Chicago-area Negro Fellowship League.
1911: Begins three-year return to journalism.
1913 (Jan.): Founds Alpha Suffrage Club, first Illinois black women’s suffrage organization.
1913 (Mar. 3): Integrates suffrage parade against orders and to dismay of southern delegates.
1913 (May 28): Becomes Chicago’s first black adult probation officer.
1914: World War I begins; US joins in 1917.
1917: Publishes The East Saint Louis Massacre, the Greatest Outrage of the Century.
1919–20: US military and British intelligence brand Wells-Barnett a “race agitator.” Excluded from NAACP National Conference on Lynching.
1919 (Sept.–Oct.): Investigates riots in Elaine, Arkansas; publishes The Arkansas Race Riot, which contributes to all accused being freed by 1925.
1920 (Jan. 16): Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting sale of alcohol goes into effect.
1920: Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting female suffrage. Negro Fellowship League closes.
1924: Regains presidency of Ida B. Wells Club but loses campaign for presidency of National Association of Colored Women.
1928–29: Mounts local Illinois campaigns against segregation and police killings.
1930: Gains only 585 votes in state senate election. Restarts work on autobiography begun years before.
1931 (Mar. 25): Dies of uremic poisoning due to kidney failure.
Thomas Moss was living the dream. He was a respected member of the Memphis social scene, an avid churchgoer, father, and husband to a pregnant wife. Hard work had made him a postal carrier and president of the People’s Grocery Company, a joint-stock general store. W. H. Barrett, the white owner of a competing grocery, a known gambler’s den, was a thorn in his side—but Moss knew he would come out ahead if he worked hard and played by the rules. Then, in March 1892, a fight broke out between children, some black and others white. Adults got involved, and suddenly there was Barrett, claiming assault by a clerk at Moss’s store.
Barrett got a friendly judge to issue warrants and spread rumors of plans to destroy the People’s Grocery, which was located beyond the borders of city police protection. The next night, black clerks fired in self-defense on what they feared was an encroaching white mob. They stopped shooting when they discovered the men were police deputies, but the damage was done. The wounded men were white. So too were the hundreds of unofficial “deputies” signed up in the wake of the “ambush” by “murderous fire from a band of negroes who were without grievance,” as a local white paper described that night.1 The deputies ransacked the People’s Grocery and hundreds of black homes, arresting Moss—who had not been present.
Four days after the shoot-out, a gang of whites entered the jail unhindered and seized Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, three men with no criminal records and sterling reputations. The gang dragged them miles north of town, shot Stewart and McDowell, and gouged out McDowell’s eyes. Moss “begged for his life for the sake of ‘his wife and child and unborn baby.’”2 He was shot to death.
One of Thomas Moss’s friends, a godmother to his daughter, was a young teacher and aspiring journalist who was out of town when he was killed. Upon her return, she used every means at her disposal to shed light on the crime against Moss and end the injustice of such lynchings. Ida B. Wells-Barnett had found the cause that would animate her life and leave her admired around the world.
At the end of the Civil War, people who had lived their lives in bondage were suddenly free citizens alongside those who had enslaved them. These freed persons were often uneducated or unskilled. Some were forced to seek employment with former owners, while others left the South in pursuit of better lives. Many ended up as sharecroppers in a system of leasing plots of land that nearly preserved the economic structure of slavery. They also faced a white backlash. One white typified the times when he complained, “Any stranger seeing those Negroes would have supposed that blacks not whites were masters in the south.”3
Slave owners had insisted that blacks were ignorant and incapable of living free. They found it galling to see their former slaves become their equals—or betters. Meanwhile, many Northerners who had opposed slavery nonetheless held deeply racist assumptions about black potential. One popular strain of thought argued that slavery had “civilized” the black race, which now was sliding back into African barbarism. Systematized racial segregation, which began in the North, migrated south as whites tried to regain their place of privilege.
After the war came Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the Southern states back into the union under strict conditions, including political rights for blacks. The white South hated it. In the Compromise of 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to remove federal troops from the South and allow predominantly white Southern Democrats to retake state governments. Within a few years, black political rights disappeared, and segregation deepened.
Just as in Florence Nightingale’s England, women were expected to be pious, submissive, and focused on domestic matters. Both sexes imagined the ideal woman to be delicate and white, pure and chaste, without sexual desire, and submissive to her husband. This social fiction, “the cult of true womanhood,” became a weapon against those who defied the norm. Women who worked outside the home, spoke up against men, had dark skin, or were sexually active faced being ostracized and declared unwomanly.
Some women co-opted the moral mantle and projected themselves as guardians of public morality. Many campaigned for the prohibition of alcohol, which they blamed for a host of societal ills from poverty to domestic abuse and gambling. Others cut their teeth on prohibition and then turned to the more controversial cause of women’s suffrage. The prohibition and suffrage movements often deliberately excluded women of color and could be horribly racist in their public appeals—for instance, by casting prohibition as a means of taming alcoholism among black men. As Harriet Tubman discovered, many white suffragettes explicitly argued that white women’s votes could be the antidote to the increasing political power of African Americans and immigrants.
Race, gender, and class collided toxically in the form of lynching. Lynching is murder, beyond the bounds of law, by an informal group like a mob. The mob usually accused the victim of some wrongdoing—from a mere gesture of disrespect or petty theft to severe crimes such as rape—and took matters into its own hands. There were relatively few lynchings under slavery, when black people were considered valuable property. Instead, the practice reached its peak in the South between 1877 and the 1930s, during which victims were primarily black men.
Lynching is murder. But authorities knew what was happening and looked the other way. Many lynchings were well-attended entertainment spectacles for the whole family. Both killers and victims were often Christians, and lynchings sometimes took place after church on Sunday afternoons. Hanging was common, but mobs also shot, castrated, flayed, or found even more unthinkably cruel means of killing their victims.
In addition to lynchings, there were sporadic race riots. An incident or rumor would spark white mob violence against blacks and, in some cases, further violence in self-defense or retaliation. Usually, these race riots ended with African American deaths and destruction of property, with no charges against their killers. The worst mass murders in US history are not our modern mass shootings but these instances of racial mob violence.
Blacks and whites all had explanations for lynchings. Whites cast lynching as a brutal but justified response to black barbarity. Elites, black and white alike, depicted lynch mobs and their victims as representatives of the lowest class of whites and the least-civilized blacks. Above all, people claimed lynching was justified to protect the honor of white women who had been raped by black men. As Christian ethicist Emilie Townes has noted, “The subordination of Blacks, through an ideology of the Black savage, and the confinement of white women in the cult of womanhood were interdependent and mutually supporting.”4 So race, class, and gender all became part of the rationale for lynchings.
Almost everyone, black and white, accepted some part of the web of lies surrounding lynching—that is, until an enterprising young journalist from Memphis laid the truth bare for all to see. Her decades-long campaign would make lynching an international scandal and make Ida B. Wells-Barnett one of the great moral leaders.
EARLY AND PRIVATE LIFE
Ida B. Wells was born into conflict, and in conflict she would remain. In the middle of the Civil War, July 16, 1862, Elizabeth Wells gave birth to her first child, Ida, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. During Ida’s infancy, Holly Springs witnessed a dozen major skirmishes. The eldest of eight children, Ida was born a slave: her parents, Elizabeth and James, were both the property of a Mr. Bolling of Holly Springs. James’s father was his owner; he had repeatedly raped James’s mother and kept the resulting children in bondage. James’s owner insisted that he learn carpentry in order to enhance his value. Ida’s mother, Elizabeth, was the cook in the Bolling household and a survivor of a lifetime of beatings and separation from loved ones who had been sold.
Free after the war, James set up shop as a carpenter and cook. He also became active in Reconstruction-era politics, which undoubtedly rubbed off on young Ida, setting her up for conflict with her society’s rigid gender roles. From her strict but loving mother, Ida inherited faith, moral idealism, and commitment to education. Elizabeth could not read and saw learning as the path to opportunity for her children. James did too, and he helped found Rust College in Mississippi, which Ida attended.
Tragedy struck in 1878, when Ida was sixteen. She was visiting her grandmother when yellow fever came to Holly Springs. The Wells family was hit hard. James died on September 26. Elizabeth followed the next day. Their youngest child also died. Before James died, he gave his savings to a white doctor to pass on to Ida. Unfortunately, illicit rumors would dog her for years after he was seen giving her the money and would leave her bitter about her time in Holly Springs.
Elders of the local Masonic lodge, of which James had been a member, decided to split the surviving youngsters between local families. Ida would have none of it. Instead, she became certified as a teacher and found a job some miles outside town. Ida never loved teaching, but the job was a lifeline. Even with her father’s savings, money was tight. Ida’s brothers eventually moved out on their own. One developed a gambling habit and was a constant worry. Her sister Eugenia died mysteriously in 1881. By 1889, all her siblings lived either independently or with relatives. Despite Ida’s willingness to sacrifice and her typical fearlessness about the responsibility, her dreams of caring for her family outstretched her ability.
In 1879, she left Holly Springs to move in with her aunt in Memphis, Tennessee, along with her sisters Lily and Annie. Memphis was a growing city that thought itself the model of the New South. Wells’s job as a teacher opened the door into the city’s thriving black middle class, and she quickly became a fixture of the Memphis black community. But Wells had trouble affording the fine clothing and trappings to match her social status. She often fell into debt and relied on friends for loans. She also struggled to hold down housing after her aunt left Memphis, and she shuttled between boardinghouses. Success as a journalist improved the situation, but she was not financially secure until marrying.
Wells attended churches of many denominations. She led a Bible study at the influential Beale Street Baptist Church. Emilie Townes writes, “Wells-Barnett was not unusual for the women of her period. Her strong church ties provided the basis for social change and civil rights. . . . Churches were the major benevolent, spiritual, and social institutions of the African-American community.”5 She had high moral standards and expectations for others, and frowned upon uneducated preachers who did not live a Christian life.
Faith was an essential part of her life from an early age. When Ida was a young girl, her mother had her read the entire Bible, cover to cover. Her diary, kept intermittently, overflows with praise for God. “I felt lifted up and I thank God I opened my mouth and told of His wonderful mercies to me and my heart overflowed with thankfulness,” she wrote after one worship service.6 “She espoused an evangelical piety,” Townes comments, “which was forged within the Black Church and was molded by a strong sense of morality and personal dignity as a woman.”7 In Wells’s era, many African Americans hoped that leading a life of disciplined evangelical faith would force whites to see them as moral equals.
Wells’s faith also sustained her social activism. She turned to God to lament and seek a path forward. “Her cry of bitter disappointment, ‘O God is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?’ reveals the depth of her disillusionment,” Townes writes. “Yet as she voiced her frustration, she appealed to God to ‘show us the way, even as Thou led the children of Israel out of bondage into the promised land.’”8 Like other African American women of her period, Wells “began with an intense personal experience of the divine . . . and took that call to salvation into the public realm to reform a corrupt moral order.”9 Wells was passionate in defense of the honor of black women and fierce in her commitment to seeing her marginalized community win dignity. It was personal: “And if I did nothing, sacrificed nothing in return for all that has been done for me,” she wrote in her journal, “I could not expect his blessing and sanction. Help me and bring success to my efforts I pray.”10
Memphis was quite a place for an amiable, intelligent, unattached young woman. Numerous eligible young men courted her. She corresponded with a handful, but most expected the submissive, domestic specimen of their imaginations. Wells was both deeply conservative in her opinion of women and yet ferociously unwilling to be constrained. She cared deeply about her honor and became angry when suitors acted too familiar with her. She was charming, even flirtatious, yet kept her own stringent moral code. Still, as an independent woman she became the target of rumors that dogged her for years.
In the 1890s, she finally met someone who shared her moral vision and appreciated her independent drive. Ferdinand Barnett was a Chicago-area lawyer, activist, and publisher. The two ran in the same circles for some time before marrying in 1895. By then, Wells was already an international celebrity for her anti-lynching work. Upon marriage, Ida hyphenated her name to Wells-Barnett, a rare move at the time. She and Ferdinand became a force in local and national political movements.
Just as Wells surprised men with her independence, she surprised some women with traditional views on family. She forcefully defended motherhood and argued that one of God’s great gifts to women was the ability to bring new life into the world. Eventually, she gave birth to four children: two boys, Charles and Herman, and two girls, Ida and Alfreda. The girls in particular were the light of Ida’s life. “I know my girls are true to me, to themselves and their God wherever they are, and my heart is content . . . whatever others may do, my girls are now and will be shining examples of noble true womanhood.”11
Husbands willing to advance their wives’ careers were rare at the time and are still rare today. Barnett loved Wells just as she was and sought to support her work. He hired a nanny to accompany her on travels to help with their small children. He did much of the cooking at home. Much like other leaders, Wells-Barnett struggled to balance family and vocation, and her career did slow while her children were young. Ferdinand’s selfless support helped make it possible for her to continue her work.
Her entire family became a source of inspiration. In November 1909, Wells-Barnett received word of the lynching of William James in Cairo, Illinois. She was tempted to let others fight. Ferdinand sent their son Charles up to their room, where he asked, “If you don’t go, mama, who will?” As Wells-Barnett recounted the moment, “I looked at my child standing there by the bed reminding me of my duty, and I thought of that passage of Scripture which tells of the wisdom from the mouths of babes and sucklings.”12
Her investigation in Cairo almost single-handedly exposed the facts of the lynching and got the local sheriff removed from office. It was a crowning moment, but not one a young Ida B. Wells would have foreseen. As a young schoolteacher in Memphis in the early 1880s, such a career would have seemed unlikely.
VOCATION
Ida’s first teaching job in Memphis was a few miles outside the city, and she could take the train. Segregated transportation was not yet law in Tennessee, nor enforced as strictly as it soon would be, but conductors commonly forced people of color to sit in the crowded, loud, unpleasant, and dangerous smokers’ car. Wells usually purchased a first-class ticket and sat in the ladies’ car—a practice that was (usually) tolerated. But in September 1883, a conductor demanded that she leave her seat and go to the smokers’ car. She defended her seat to the point of biting the conductor’s hand and bracing herself so that the conductor needed the help of white passengers to throw her out.
Being thrown off that train was her big break. The experience left her furious that an upstanding lady would be so treated on the account of her race, but it also opened doors and exposed her gifts. She wrote about the experience in the Living Way, a black Memphis newspaper, and began her career as a journalist. She also sued the railroad, winning damages at first but losing on appeal before the state supreme court. She later wrote about her start in journalism, “I felt I had at last found my real vocation.”13
For the next few years, Wells continued teaching while writing for the Living Way and other papers. She was paid poorly, if at all. She did achieve a level of national recognition and acclaim under the pen name “Iola,” which is of unclear origins. Iola put words to the indignities that many had faced and shocked others who thought that class privilege might shield them from the kind of treatment Ida had suffered.
Though editors initially tried to make her a sort of early lifestyle columnist, her topics spanned from local Memphis commentary to matters of public morality, musings on the church, racial uplift, and more. She attracted attention with a rare mix of iron convictions, humor, blunt talk, and piercing insight. “A strong sense of God’s judgement and the necessity of right action in relation to God’s will also pervades Wells’ writing,” Townes notes.14 She had a natural talent for identifying injustice, hypocrisy, and ill will—and an overflowing enthusiasm for calling attention to it. She could be harsh but was rarely unfair. By 1889, her trenchant columns and personal charisma had earned her the affectionate title “Iola, Princess of the Press.”
In June 1889, she became one of the editors of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, later shortened to the Free Speech. When co-owners Taylor Nightingale and J. L. Fleming invited her to join them, she refused to do so without also becoming a one-third owner. With a guaranteed publishing platform, Wells’s fame continued to grow. She used it to advocate for legislation in Congress as well as to weigh in on Memphis politics. The latter cost Wells her job as a teacher after she wrote an article critical of Memphis public schools. With a full-time focus on journalism, she increased the paper’s circulation from fifteen hundred to four thousand in one year.
In September 1891, the Free Speech published an editorial decrying a lynching in Georgetown, Kentucky. Though it has all the hallmarks of Wells’s style, white men in Memphis assumed her co-owner Taylor Nightingale had authored it. Facing a growing backlash, Nightingale fled Memphis for Oklahoma, leaving Wells as a half-owner. The next spring, Wells would face the same peril herself.
She was away from Memphis when a mob lynched her close friend Thomas Moss and two others. The accounts in the white press, which she read upon her return, were so detailed that it appeared obvious to her that reporters had been present. Yet no one was ever arrested for the crime. Wells was incensed. Years earlier, according to her diary, lynchings had provoked prayers of pleading: “O, God when will these massacres cease?” and “Oh my God! Can such things be and no justice for it?”15 Now she was in a position to do something.
Her first mission was to counter the demonization of Thomas Moss and justifications for his death that appeared in white newspapers. Then she turned to lynching writ large. Angela Sims notes that Wells-Barnett consistently recommended using the tools of “boycott, emigration, and exposure in the press” to confront lynching.16 She encouraged the Memphis black community to boycott white businesses and emigrate to Oklahoma. And she set out to publicize the facts about lynchings.
“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,” she later reflected. “But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee [Will] Stewart had been lynched . . . with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; 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 nigger down.’”17
Wells was “not the first to expose rape as a mythical cause of mob action, but she soon became the loudest and most persistent voice for truth.”18 This nearly got her killed before it made her famous. Once more, Wells was lucky to be out of town. She was traveling when the Free Speech published her most infamous editorial. Wells wrote, “Nobody in this section of the community believes that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”19 It sparked an absolute firestorm.
White newspapers were outraged. One paper snidely observed, “The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites.”20 The paper then strongly hinted that such patience should come to an end. On May 27, 1892, a white mob descended on the office of the Free Speech and destroyed it. Wells’s remaining co-owner fled town. Wells, arriving in New York, was advised that a bounty had been placed on her head. Men were waiting at the Memphis station for her to return. Facing death threats, she chose to remain in New York.
In New York, Wells became part owner of the New York Age. She used the platform to launch her anti-lynching campaign to new heights. She began with a series of editorials laying bare the myths that supported lynching. As she had at the Free Speech, she relied heavily on accounts published in white papers to undermine lynching with the words of its apologists. Wells published her editorials as a pamphlet, Southern Horrors: The Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and began giving speeches. Asked once, “What can I do to help the cause?” she replied, “The answer is always this, ‘Tell the world the facts.’ When the Christian world knows the alarming growth and extent of outlawry in our land, some means will be found to stop it.”21
In 1893 and 1894, she made two widely publicized trips to England. She was a powerful speaker but also wise enough to present lurid accounts dispassionately and clinically. This added credibility to her arguments and disarmed those who found her topics, such as sex and interracial relationships, salacious. Overcoming complications with her hosts and ongoing money troubles, her trips were a massive success. Within a few years, governors and white newspapers in the South noticed declining British investment as a result.
Wells took her speaking tour across the United States in the 1890s—with the exception of the South, where her life would have been at risk. She eventually settled in Chicago and joined the Chicago Conservator. In 1895, she married her coeditor, Ferdinand Barnett, and hyphenated her name to Wells-Barnett. She also published one of her most famous works, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. The pamphlet surveys the history of lynching in the United States and black people’s progress since the end of slavery. Then she presents her carefully collected data to expose the underlying motivations for lynchings. It remains one of her most important works.
Such a detailed treatment was necessary to dispel myths. In the early 1890s, the Commercial Appeal, a white Memphis paper, wrote, “All good citizens admit that lynch-law is wrong, but they are rapidly coming to the conclusion that the negroes themselves are the only people who can suppress the evil, and the way for them to get rid of it is to cease committing the peculiar and shocking crimes which provoke it.”22 Editorials like these were typical and assumed that lynchings were a response to outrageous crimes. Then they argued that the blame rested with the behavior of the black victims. Wells-Barnett spent the 1890s systematically tearing down such justifications.
Wells-Barnett noted that victims were accused of rape in one-third of cases. And lynching was rarely a response to the rape of black women. “What becomes a crime deserving of capital punishment when the tables are turned,” she commented dryly, “is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.”23 She argued that many black lynching victims were engaged in consensual relationships with white women who either accused them when caught or simply refused to offer an alibi—some of whom later recanted. Paula Giddings notes that Wells-Barnett cited one Nashville incident that exposed all the myths:
A black man, guilty only of visiting a white woman, was taken out of jail with “the police and militia” standing by and dragged down the street where the mob plunged knives into him at every step. Finally, the man, named Grizzard, was swung out on a bridge, and as he tried to climb up the stanchions his hands were cut to pieces. At the time, when these “civilized whites were announcing their determination ‘to protect their wives and daughters,’” Wells wrote, a white man was in the same jail for raping eight-year-old Maggie Reese, a “little Afro-American girl” who suffered injuries that “ruined her for life.” The white perpetrator served six months and later became a detective in the city.24
Citing Thomas Moss, Wells-Barnett argued that the motivation for lynchings was outrage at the economic and civil progress blacks had made since slavery. She noted that Moss had done nothing wrong but run a thriving business that even won some white customers away from its competition. Lynching had never been about protecting women’s honor. Its purpose was keeping the black community in the South impoverished and scared.
Wells-Barnett spent the remainder of the 1890s fighting lynching. She lobbied Congress and US president William McKinley for legislation. She investigated lynchings and published the results in pamphlets including Lynch Law in Georgia, Mob Rule in New Orleans, and Lynch Law in America. Underlying all her work was a faith that a Christian nation would not tolerate such horrors if they were fully exposed. “The nation cannot profess Christianity, which makes the golden rule its foundation stone,” she said, “and continue to deny equal opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the black race.”25
Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching work made her one of the most famous turn-of-the-century black leaders, alongside Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. She was part of the founding of the National Association of Colored Women, where her son was the youngest attendee and Harriet Tubman the oldest. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement, where she quickly butted heads with white women who refused to denounce lynchings or who insisted on segregated activism. She also clashed with temperance activists, like Frances Willard, who disparaged blacks during their crusades. She and Ferdinand were staples of Chicago black politics, where she founded and participated in a dizzying array of organizations, including launching the first black women’s suffrage organization in Illinois.
An initial fan of Booker T. Washington, she quickly tired of what she perceived as his overemphasis on economic self-development to the neglect of building political power. Wells-Barnett and her husband later joined W. E. B. DuBois’s Niagara Movement, and she was part of the executive committee that organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the most famous twentieth-century African American advocacy organization. Typically, though, she became disillusioned with the group and later gravitated to the more radical politics of Marcus Garvey.
In 1910, she founded the Negro Fellowship League in Chicago as a personal platform for activism and a way to work directly with black émigrés from the South. The Negro Fellowship League was a combination of YMCA and advocacy organization. She relied on major donors at first. Later, she became Illinois’s first black adult probation officer and funded the organization with her own salary. She kept writing and speaking, and made a short-lived return to publishing.
Wells-Barnett never stopped speaking out against injustice. During the last two decades of her life, she was still actively campaigning for antilynching legislation and organizing for suffrage in Illinois. She published The Arkansas Race Riot after visiting twelve black men in Elaine, Arkansas, who had been sentenced to death after their attempts to unionize had sparked violence. She kept taking on leadership roles in new organizations, even after illness in 1920 slowed her schedule. She began working on her never-finished autobiography. In 1930, she ran for state senate in Illinois but secured only 585 votes.
In later years, her fame faded. She reflected with chagrin on her mistakes but never abandoned her principles. “Neither did Jesus Christ have any of the leading people with him in his day,” she once wrote. “If I remember correctly, his twelve disciples were made up of fishermen, tax collectors, publicans, and sinners. It was the leading people who refused to believe on him and finally crucified him.”26 Wells-Barnett believed “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”27 She spent her life trying to lift up that voice to a nation she was certain would hear and respond. Only kidney failure, which claimed her life on May 25, 1931, was finally able to end Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s fearless campaign.
LEGACY AND CRITICISM
Ida B. Wells-Barnett sharply distinguished good from evil and refused to stay silent in the face of wrongdoing. She had high standards—for herself, her community, and her nation—as well as a fearless attitude and an utter faith in the power of truth. These allowed her to peel back layers of obfuscation and present the ugly truth about lynching to the entire nation. Wells-Barnett did more than any single individual to end the scourge of lynching. Millions of Americans were willing to ignore or excuse mob killings. She insisted on keeping injustice in the public eye. Lynching never again reached the heights of the 1890s once she turned her sharp pen on the national shame.
In the process, Wells-Barnett changed the moral landscape of her time. She realized that all calls for civil or economic rights grow from an affirmation of a people’s humanity. Lynching tore the beating heart out of that argument. If society is fine with killing members of an oppressed group, why would it care about that group’s jobs, health, and prosperity? To oppose lynching was to declare sacred those lives that the rest of society discounted.
Wells-Barnett practiced what she preached. She knew no divide between personal conviction and public action. She demanded both public and private morality. That demand for integrated morality extends to communities of faith. Her belief that faith must produce deeds of deliverance led to strong words for those who tolerated the horror of lynching. Wells-Barnett wrote that white Christian churches were “too busy saving the souls of white Christians from future burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in the flames kindled by white Christians.” She noted that a misplaced fear of causing harm leaves allies silent. “The feelings of the people who do these acts must not be hurt by protesting against this sort of thing,” she paraphrased the argument, “and so the bodies of the victims of mob hate must be sacrificed, and the country disgraced, because of that fear to speak out.”28 Many of the horrors described in this book occurred because people never overcame that fear of speaking out.
We can learn from Wells-Barnett’s fearless commitment to truth. The characteristics of lynchings were predominantly black victims, an absence of due process, the use of lethal force, and excuses for the crime that put the blame on the victim’s behavior. A fair observer will see these same traits in unjustified police killings of people of color. The legacy of leaders such as Wells-Barnett forces us to revisit our assumptions about such polarizing topics. We hope no reader will dismiss such parallels without asking what Wells-Barnett might say about these events.
Along with the anti-lynching crusade, Wells-Barnett’s life testifies to the importance of journalism, the power of perspective, and the necessity of a free press. “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press,” she once said.29 As a journalist, she is unique among the leaders in this book. She founded and led organizations, but she made her mark with a pen and a printing press. The thriving black press of her time offered a platform for views that white editors would have deemed radical. Wells-Barnett’s story should also make us question the wisdom of ever more concentrated media conglomerates. It also serves as a cautionary tale in any nation where freedom of the press is under assault. Wells-Barnett is proof that journalism can be a powerful antidote to the poison of injustice.
Wells-Barnett’s first instinct was to respond to criticisms, or even disagreements, by overreacting, lashing out, or withdrawing entirely. To her credit, she acknowledged this fact in her diary and prayed to God for patience and help. And of course, much of the criticism was unwarranted. Early in her life, unfounded rumors of sexual impropriety hounded her. Throughout her career, men continually encouraged her to realize her “place” or quit addressing such controversial topics.
Her fierce rhetoric on race annoyed whites who liked to think of themselves as progressive allies. And she certainly had a knack for outraging the many deeply and openly racist whites of the day. She was a militant in an era when women were not expected to be aggressive and people of color were not expected to agitate. Toward the end of her life, during World War I, both the US military and British intelligence branded her a race agitator, a reminder that governments throughout history have repeatedly turned law enforcement and the military against justice advocates, especially people of color.
Wells-Barnett allowed for the use of force in self-defense. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” she once wrote, “and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”30 Wells-Barnett abhorred unjust violence—it was the root of her every campaign. But she saw mobs killing members of her community with impunity and insisted that force must be used to preserve life. Nevertheless, her endorsement of gun ownership and violent self-defense contrasts with the views of others in this book.
Perhaps the fairest criticism of Wells-Barnett is that she was impossible to work with. There were few moments in her life when she was not embroiled in some sort of controversy. “She could not relax her own rigid moral standards to allow for human failings and weaknesses,” Townes writes. “In clinging to a fiercely high moral code of conduct for herself as well as others, Wells-Barnett often alienated people with her attitude of disdain and disapproval.”31 She did not have patience for long meetings or committees. Her fiery temper and prickly nature did not fade with age.
Wells-Barnett’s lofty standards of morality inevitably led to conflict. The deeper issue, though, was that she “lacked the ability to combine the prophetic with the pastoral.”32 Prophets quickly denounce immorality in society. Being pastoral requires working with human beings who are neither wholly moral nor utterly immoral but simply imperfect. Wells-Barnett “could not fully consider the need to care for the people behind the institutions. . . . She could not always make her passion flesh, because she was unable to accept the reality of human failing, human wavering.”33
Both Wells-Barnett and Harriet Tubman were black women in a country that prefers its heroes white and/or male. Wells-Barnett created additional problems for herself. She never lasted long in any of the organizations she helped found. She struggled to get elected to leadership roles. Wells-Barnett deserves to be remembered as one of the great civil rights activists, alongside contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. But institutions outlast human lives and thus help preserve human legacies, and Wells-Barnett struggled to make peace within such institutions.
As white Americans quickly tried to forget the era of lynching, Wells-Barnett was left behind. Yet Wells-Barnett has remained a hero and a moral leader for black women in America. Emilie Townes cites Wells-Barnett as a model for womanist ethics. Angela Sims sees her as a model for confronting similar challenges today. Toni C. King and S. Alease Ferguson cite Wells-Barnett among legendary black women leaders and note, “Our exposure to these vital women figures in the cultural memory of African Americans became a part of how we saw leadership.”34
Wells-Barnett inspires activists who believe that exposing outrages will provoke people of goodwill to respond. She is also one of the most important figures in the history of American journalism. Today, the Ida B. Wells Society seeks to carry on her legacy by offering training to increase the number of people of color working in journalism.35
Finally, as police killings of people of color continue to be a hot-button political issue, more people are rediscovering Ida B. Wells-Barnett as a prescient voice on race and justice.36 Sims notes that not only have the problems Wells-Barnett confronted not disappeared, they have mutated. Wells-Barnett’s triple agenda of boycott, emigration, and writing offers a model for continuing the struggle, especially if that writing preserves the memory of the lynched then, today, and in the future. The “southern horrors” Wells-Barnett denounced remain today: “Though disguised to reflect twenty-first-century practices, [such horrors] are still very much an aspect of American culture.”37
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s life and work offer a number of important lessons about moral leadership:
- Be fearless. Wells-Barnett never backed down or shied away from responsibility but rather threw herself into the fray in pursuit of justice. Do not blind yourself to consequences, but be willing to face them in order to do what is right. Moral leadership will always provoke a backlash.
- Trust what you see. Some moral leaders find solutions to problems everyone can see. Others invite society to see injustice where it would rather turn a blind eye. Trust that tireless campaigning can put moral issues on the map.
- Journalism is a vehicle for change. Not all moral leaders lead nations or political institutions. Though Wells-Barnett certainly led organizations, the enduring testimony of her life is to the power of investigative journalism.
- Family partnerships matter. Wells-Barnett was driven, but even she could not have balanced her career and family without a domestic partnership with her husband, Ferdinand. Do not assume you can do it all—find people willing to share the burden.
- Tend to relationships. Wells-Barnett’s high moral code spurred her to greatness even as it hurt her ability to sustain relationships and work in organizations. Balance the pastoral with the prophetic.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett surveyed supposedly isolated cases of violence, connected the dots, and pronounced an epidemic. Through forceful campaigning and the power of the pen, she transformed an injustice not fit for discussion in polite company into an international cause. She tore through a web of myths to arrive at the truth about lynchings, and she united far-flung allies into a movement to put an end to it. She lived long enough to see lynching numbers decline in the face of international condemnation she had sparked.
Wells-Barnett led a life of faith and action. She rejected the “other-worldly fascination that was an acknowledged aspect of the African-American Christianity of that era,” Darryl Trimiew writes, and instead “worshiped a God who could act in history to liberate oppressed people. Such a God demands that believers also attempt to transform the world.”38 Wells-Barnett strove to be one of those believers. It cost her a successful newspaper—and very nearly her life. Afterward, she wrote, “Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life and been made an exile, I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth.”39 She did exactly that—providing a lasting testament to the power of truth to transform the hearts of humankind.
Late in Wells-Barnett’s life, Mrs. N. F. Mossell, a strong supporter, asked, “Who shall say that such a work accomplished by one woman, exiled and maligned by that community among whom she had so long and valiantly labored, bending every effort to the upbuilding of the manhood and womanhood of all races, shall not place her in the front ranks of philanthropists, not only of the womanhood of this race, but among all those laborers of all ages and all climes?”40 It is a question that society still asks today, but we are inclined to agree with Mrs. Mossell.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- How did Wells-Barnett’s early childhood experiences, her train incident, and the lynching of Thomas Moss shape her? Which had the greatest impact?
- What made working in organizations so difficult for Wells-Barnett? How was that weakness connected to her strengths as a moral leader?
- What would Wells-Barnett say about American society today? How do you think you would react if you were reading her editorials in the 1890s?
- How did faith and the church influence Wells-Barnett’s life?
- How did gender, class, and race intersect in Wells-Barnett’s life? How do they intersect today?
FOR FURTHER READING
Bay, Mia. To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
Giddings, Paula J. Ida: A Sword among Lions; Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
King, Toni C., and S. Alease Ferguson, eds. Black Womanist Leadership: Tracing the Motherline. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
McMurry, Linda O. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sims, Angela D. Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Townes, Emilie. Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993.
Trimiew, Darryl. Voices of the Silenced: The Responsible Self in a Marginalized Community. Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1993.
Wells, Ida B. The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. Edited by Mia Bay and Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Penguin Classics, 2014.
1. Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 132.
2. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 133.
3. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 19.
4. Emilie Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 87.
5. Townes, Womanist Justice, 95.
6. Townes, Womanist Justice, 108.
7. Townes, Womanist Justice, 35.
8. Townes, Womanist Justice, 9.
9. Townes, Womanist Justice, 85.
10. Townes, Womanist Justice, 109.
11. Townes, Womanist Justice, 124.
12. Townes, Womanist Justice, 186.
13. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 119.
14. Townes, Womanist Justice, 109.
15. Townes, Womanist Justice, 113.
16. Angela D. Sims, Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 13.
17. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 143.
18. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 146.
19. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 146.
20. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 147.
21. Townes, Womanist Justice, 116.
22. Townes, Womanist Justice, 153.
23. Townes, Womanist Justice, 121.
24. Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions; Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 224.
25. Townes, Womanist Justice, 118.
26. Townes, Womanist Justice, 196.
27. Townes, Womanist Justice, 106.
28. Townes, Womanist Justice, 118.
29. Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, ed. Mia Bay and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014), 80.
30. Wells, “Southern Horrors,” 80.
31. Townes, Womanist Justice, 205.
32. Townes, Womanist Justice, 204.
33. Townes, Womanist Justice, 204.
34. Toni C. King and S. Alease Ferguson, eds., Black Womanist Leadership: Tracing the Motherline (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), xi.
35. “The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting,” http://idabwellssociety.org/about/.
36. Keisha N. Blain, “Ida B. Wells Offered the Solution to Police Violence More than 100 Years Ago,” Washington Post, July 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/11/ida-b-wells-offered-the-solution-to-police-violence-more-than-100-years-ago/.
37. Sims, Ethical Complications of Lynching, 134.
38. Darryl Trimiew, Voices of the Silenced: The Responsible Self in a Marginalized Community (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1993), 44.
39. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 156.
40. Townes, Womanist Justice, 161.