CHAPTER 26 The Hands of Parties Unknown

June 27, 1895

Chicago, Illinois

They came by the hundreds to see Ida Wells, from the North and South, from California and New York, to a place that would soon be called the Black Metropolis—the colored Douglas neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, a few blocks from the shore of Lake Michigan.

More than nine hundred of them—businessmen and politicians, lawyers and activists—made it inside the magnificent A.M.E. Bethel Church and filled its pews to capacity. Many dozens more lined the streets around the ornate church. Built of massive stone blocks and St. Louis pressed brick, the Romanesque structure stood on the corner of Dearborn and 30th Streets and was, according to one newspaper, “a monument to the enterprise of the colored race.” The Douglas neighborhood, though run-down and neglected, boasted several new black businesses and culture centers. It was only fitting that so many would come to see her there, in the heart of Chicago’s Black Belt, at the start of what was called the Colored Renaissance.

Yet they did not come to hear Ida Wells give a speech.

They came to see her get married.

She would wed Ferdinand Lee Barnett, an accomplished black lawyer ten years older than she. Barnett’s first wife died five years earlier of heart disease, when their children were four and two. Wells had worked with Barnett on a libel case she filed against a Memphis newspaper in 1893. That same year, they collaborated on a pamphlet protesting the lack of black representation at the Chicago World’s Fair.

The Nashville-born Barnett, like Wells, was a journalist, activist, and civic leader. At twenty-six, he cofounded Chicago’s first black newspaper, the Conservator, and published a steady collection of antilynching stories and columns. He was popular and dashing, fond of silk hats and Prince Edward coats, and when he fell for Ida Wells he made sure she had a letter from him waiting at every stop of her speaking tour. They were, it seemed, wonderfully suited for each other.

Yet Wells postponed their wedding three times, in order to deliver antilynching speeches. She did not want a big, fancy ceremony, until a Chicago women’s club inspired by and named for her asked for permission to manage the affair. Wells agreed, and her wedding became a major social occasion, with finely printed invitations, a long guest list of notable figures, and a front-page mention in the New York Times.

“The interest of the public in the affair seemed to be so great,” Wells would write, “that not only was the church filled to overflowing but the streets surrounding the church were so packed with humanity that it was almost impossible for the carriage bearing the bridal party to reach the church door.”

The ceremony, set for 8:00 p.m., was late to start. Ten women from the Ida B. Wells Club, dressed in white, served as ushers. The young Rev. D. A. Graham, with his fierce muttonchops beard and logical, practical oratorical style, waited at the altar. The organist Gertrude Johnson played Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” the wedding march from the opera Lohengrin. The flower girl, Betty Womack, sprinkled petals down the aisle, followed by Wells’s sisters Annie and Lilly, wearing lemon crepe dresses with white ribbons, slippers, and gloves. Ida Wells was next.

Then thirty-three, she wore a white satin wedding gown trimmed with chiffon and orange blossoms. She walked down the church’s left aisle, ahead of two groomsmen, R. P. Bird and S. J. Evans, who came down the right side. Ferdinand Barnett took his bride-to-be’s hand at the altar. The organist played a sweet rendition of “Call Me Thine Own,” and Rev. Graham proclaimed the couple man and wife. Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” rang through the church as little Betty Womack led the procession back down the aisle, scattering more petals as she went.

Rather than give up her own last name, Ida Wells became Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett.

By all accounts, the wedding was a simple and beautiful celebration of love and community, and for Wells—who’d spent the previous three years traveling relentlessly throughout the United States and Great Britain on her antilynching crusade—a deserved respite and blessing.

And yet many saw it as a betrayal.

As soon as Wells’s wedding was announced in June 1895, “there arose a united protest from my people,” she wrote. “They seemed to feel that I had deserted the cause, and some of them censured me rather severely in their newspapers for having done so.” Many argued it would be impossible for Wells to devote the necessary energy and passion to the movement she created once she was married and raising a family.

Even the reformer and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, who had become friendly with Wells, seemed unhappy with her decision to wed. A year after the birth of her first child, Wells was a guest in Anthony’s home while both were working on launching the Afro-American League, a collective that would protest racial injustice. After a few days together, Wells noticed how Anthony “would bite out my married name when addressing me,” she wrote. “Finally, I said to her, ‘Miss Anthony, don’t you believe in women getting married?’ ”

“Oh yes,” she remembered Anthony replying, “but not women like you who had a special call for special work. I too might have married but it would have meant dropping the work to which I had set my hand.”

Anthony did not try to be diplomatic. She blamed Wells for a loss of momentum in the movement for black rights. “I know of no one in all this country better fitted to do the work you had in hand than yourself,” Anthony said. “Since you have gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased. Besides, you have a divided duty. You are here trying to help in the formation of this league and your eleven-month-old baby needs your attention at home.”

Wells wasn’t happy with the criticism, which she believed was misguided. The real reason she was scaling back her public activism was that “I had been unable to get the support which was necessary to carry on my work,” Wells wrote. “I had become discouraged in the effort to carry on alone.” Her detractors, she was disappointed to learn, “were more outspoken because of the loss to the cause than they had been in holding up my hands when I was trying to carry a banner.”

Wells was also disheartened by a growing number of challenges to her leadership role, most of which she felt were political. Earlier in 1895, a group of Methodist ministers asked her to leave a meeting before she could defend herself against charges that her views on lynching were too radical. Wells was weary from all the scrambling for political position in the antilynching movement, and worn out, physically and emotionally, from years of grueling train travel and dozens of wrenching speeches. She believed she had earned the right to step back.

Wells had never longed to have children. She lacked a strong maternal pull, she said. Her guess was that, because she’d been forced to be a mother to her younger siblings at a very early age, that burden might have “smothered the mother instinct.” But as she got older, the idea of having a family of her own began to appeal to her. She decided not to answer her critics, and instead move forward with her new direction in life. Nine months after her wedding, in March 1896, Wells gave birth to a son, Charles, the first of her four children with Ferdinand Barnett.

But even then, Wells did not stop working. In fact, in the year after her wedding, she hardly seemed less busy than she had been the year before. She merely shifted her energy back to what she called “my first, and might be said, my only love”—journalism. Wells took ownership of her husband’s newspaper, the Chicago Conservator, and was in its offices, serving as publisher and editor, the Monday after her Thursday wedding.

Four months after giving birth to Charles, Wells traveled to Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, at which she was a delegate. Wells took along her baby, and her husband hired a nurse to go with her. Later that year, Wells gave speeches in several cities across Illinois, once again traveling with infant Charles. At every stop, her local hosts provided a nurse to watch over the baby while Wells delivered her speech. It was a juggling act, and Wells performed it for as long as she could. Yet she felt pulled in two directions.

Wells remained convinced of the urgency of her antilynching message, and she never left the movement completely. However, she also believed her children needed their mother to be with them as much as possible. She’d suffered the loss of her own parents at a cruelly young age, and that only made her feel more devotion to her new family. Despite her claims that she lacked a nurturing instinct, as a parent Wells “was kind and loving, but firm and strict,” her youngest daughter, Alfreda M. Barnett Duster, wrote many years later. “She impressed upon her children their responsibilities, one of the most important being good conduct in her absence.” When she was present, Duster remembered, Wells didn’t need to say a word to express disappointment: “Her ‘look’ was enough to bring under control any mischievous youngster.”

In 1897, Wells stopped working at the Conservator, and soon after gave up the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club. She resolved not to accept any work assignments that took her away from her children for long stretches until her youngest, Alfreda, was eight years old. “The duties of wife and mother were a profession in themselves,” she wrote, “and it was hopeless to expect to carry on public work.”

It was not exactly a full-blown retirement. Wells traveled locally to give speeches, often with a young child in tow. She stayed involved in the politics of her movement and lent her voice through letters and appearances when it was necessary. As hard as she thought it would be for her to “carry on public work,” she did so as events required.

But for more than ten years after her marriage to Ferdinand Barnett in 1895, Wells was, by design, a much-diminished presence on the national scene. She had retreated from the front lines. She found rich and surprising rewards in being a wife and mother, and she did not regret her decision to refocus her life. “What a wonderful place in the scheme of things the Creator has given women,” she wrote. “I cannot begin to express how I reveled in having made this discovery for myself.”

All around her, however, the lynchings did not stop.


In the small town of Danville, 145 miles south of Chicago, a swelling mob of white men and women—as many as five thousand—surged down East Main Street, headed for the county jail.

It was the night of July 25, 1903, and they were coming for James Wilson, a black man accused of attacking a white farmer’s wife. Along the way, completely by chance, the crowd swept into another black man, John Metcalf, and there was pushing and shoving. Metcalf “became involved in an altercation with some of the men in the mob,” one newspaper reported. “They started after him, and he pulled a gun.”

Metcalf fired a shot, killing Henry Gatterman, a young butcher.

Police officers caught up with the fleeing Metcalf and sped him to the police station. The mob, diverted from their original mission, was not far behind. Rather than put Metcalf in a cell, the officers locked him inside the vault used to store police records. Several men from the mob forced their way into the station, and were told Metcalf had already been taken out a back door and whisked away in a buggy. No one believed it.

Instead, some of the men left and returned with sledgehammers and railroad ties. They broke the lock on the vault door and dragged out John Metcalf. They took him six blocks back to East Main Street, hanged him from a telephone pole, and shot his body full of bullets.

The mob never got to James Wilson, their original target. But it took the men of Danville less than seventy-five minutes to encounter, provoke, pass judgment on, and end the existence of John Metcalf.

“When Danville is aroused,” one of them told a reporter, “it does things in a rush.”


The murder of John Metcalf haunted the mind of Edward D. Green, a candidate for the Illinois State House in 1904. When, that November, Green won election to the 44th General Assembly, out of Cook County’s First District, he became the only black legislator in Illinois. He took an office in the Capitol Building and “scarcely sat down in his seat,” one newspaper said, “before he began laying out his plan.”

Green’s plan was to ensure that John Metcalf’s death meant something—and to write a law that would make lynching a state crime.

There existed laws that dealt with murder and mayhem, but no language that specifically addressed mob violence, the majority of which befell black Americans. Green wanted to change that. In February 1905, he introduced the Suppression of Mob Violence Bill, which one paper called “drastic in its revisions and calculated to be far-reaching in its effects.” Green’s bill—which referenced Metcalf’s lynching—would give new legal definition to the term “mob,” shrinking it to five or more persons with intent to offer violence. It would introduce jail time and financial penalties for anyone found to have participated in a lynching.

Its most provocative feature, however, was section 6:

If any person shall be taken from the hands of a sheriff, or his deputy, having such person in custody, and shall be lynched, it shall be prima facia evidence of failure on the part of such sheriff to do his duty, and upon the fact being made to appear to the Governor, he shall publish proclamation declaring the office of such sheriff vacant, and he shall thereby and thereafter immediately be vacated.

Green’s idea was to hold white sheriffs accountable for the lynching of men wrested from their custody. This was important because of the near-total lack of accountability for the actual participants in mob lynching. It was well understood that, while most murderous mobs were made up of common townspeople—farmers, grocers, saloonkeepers, friends, fathers, sons, even local officials—no one would be identified to authorities afterward. Witnesses by the dozens would swear they didn’t recognize a single guilty party, even when they had witnessed the crimes from just a few feet away. Most coroner’s inquests into lynching ended with the same cold conclusion, the same calculated wording—the killings came “at the hands of parties unknown.”

This blind-eye practice became an unwritten code of conduct—and gave legal cover to lynch mobs. Lynching was simply considered beyond the scope of state or federal action. Mob violence, therefore, was a local issue, best left to local authorities.

Edward Green’s bill sought to upend that unwritten rule and replace it with an ironclad law.

It would not be an easy sell, but Green was the man to sell it. He was friendly and popular, a natural politician, “very polite and always with a smile on his good-natured face,” one paper declared. Green also enlisted the support of the Chicago Bar Association, and of the best-known antilynching crusader of the day, Ida Wells.

In 1904, Wells was still on self-imposed leave from her leadership role in the movement. She had not been especially prominent in the antilynching debate in the past few years. In 1903, she did not even write about the lynching of John Metcalf, even though it happened not too far south of where she lived. By 1904, she and her husband Ferdinand had four children—Charles, Herman, Ida Jr., and Alfreda. Her focus was largely on her family. Even so, she lent her support to Edward Green’s bill.

Three months after it was introduced, Illinois governor Charles S. Deneen signed twenty-nine bills into law.

One of them was Green’s Suppression of Mob Violence Act.

It was enacted by the 44th General Assembly, entered the Illinois Criminal Code as Section 256, and went into effect July 1, 1905. It was considered an enormous victory for the black race, and Edward Green was celebrated as a hero. “If he never performs another noble act in his life,” one essayist wrote, “he has covered himself over in glory and immortalized himself.” Ida Wells—who gave a speech in honor of Green at Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church that September—said the passage of the act “had given lynching its death blow in this state.”

Tragically, she was wrong.