CHAPTER 39 The Lord Has Willed It So
March 25, 1931
Chicago, Illinois
For Ida Wells, the battle of her life was against forces far too sweeping and entrenched for any one individual to defeat—slavery, patriarchy, racism, economic suppression. Yet Wells waged that war with both hands, one reaching up to pull down immoral institutions, the other reaching down to lift up the persecuted. She challenged the vast, systemic prejudices of white American society—but she also made the phone calls and collected the dollar bills that saved the life of Steve Green.
Her brave, bold actions, big and small, had rippling consequences.
What if Wells hadn’t succeeded in ousting Cairo sheriff Frank Davis? Would there have been anyone to pull Steve Green off the train leading him to his death? Would Joel Spingarn have found the cause that ignited his moral fervor and steered him to the NAACP? Would Spingarn have donated the one hundred dollars that paid for two lawyers to defend Tom Williams, and would the NAACP have made the leap to real, effective legal power that it did after Spingarn came aboard?
Wells never stopped fighting for her beliefs, but after her clash with the NAACP, she became less active. So many years of strife and heartbreak, and constant criticism from her contemporaries, had left her weary. In 1920 she was hospitalized and underwent gallbladder surgery. The operation was tricky, and she was kept in the hospital for five weeks. Many feared she wouldn’t survive. When she was brought home, she suffered a relapse, and spent another eight weeks in bed.
“It took me a year to recover,” Wells wrote, “and during that year I did more serious thinking from a personal point of view than ever before in my life.” Her contemplation led her to a painful discovery.
“All at once,” she wrote, “the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor.”
This was not true, not by any stretch—but it was how Ida Wells felt. Yet even then, she kept going. She continued to write hard-edged articles calling for action against injustice—enough articles for the U.S. government to classify her “a dangerous race agitator.” She covered a race riot in East St. Louis in 1917 and another in Arkansas in 1922. She kept up her work with clubs and reform organizations in Chicago, and she served as the director of the Cook County League of Women’s Clubs. She worked with the National Equal Rights League, marched for suffrage, and helped block the segregation of Chicago schools.
In 1930 she even ran for election to the Illinois state legislature. She lost to a white man, but she became one of the very first black women to run for political office in the United States.
This was her deepest belief, and perhaps her greatest disappointment—that the efforts of individuals like her would be the only way to create meaningful change, the only hope for real progress.
“In this work, all may aid,” Wells once said in a speech. “Individuals, organizations, press and pulpit should unite in vigorous denunciation of all forms of lawlessness. Nay, more than this, there must spring up in all sections of the country vigorous, aggressive defenders of the Constitution of our beloved land.”
And yet, to her sadness, she did not always see this necessary level of urgency in others. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, “and it does seem to me that, notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities, there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights.”
In the eternal struggle between the darkness and the light, the darkness is mutable. The horrors of slavery gave way to the horrors of lynching and Jim Crow. By one estimate, more than four thousand black Americans were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950, the staggering bloodshed forever to be the shame of America. And while the number of lynchings began to drop around 1910, that is when a new practice, known as “legal lynching,” emerged—black men given rushed sham trials and sent to die in brand-new electric chairs.
In the same way, Raymond Schindler’s desire to wrench confessions from wayward men did not, and could never, curtail the darker aspects of all human nature. The mysterious sinister force that drove Frank Heidemann to kill Marie Smith was as uncontainable and impassively constant as the endless tides in the Atlantic. A quarter century after Heidemann met his end, another German immigrant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was convicted of murdering the young son of Charles Lindbergh and sentenced to execution. He, too, was led to Carl Adams’s electrified creation in Trenton’s Fortress Penitentiary, and died in the very same wooden chair that took Frank Heidemann.
Ray Schindler left the Burns Agency in 1912 and opened his own New York City shop—the Schindler Bureau of Investigation. His father, John, the former minister, joined his sons Ray and Walter there. Schindler cleared an innocent man of murder in the infamous Sir Harry Oakes case in 1943, and cracked several other high-profile crimes.
But he always referred to his first murder case—the Marie Smith case—as the most challenging work of his career.
Schindler also indulged his fascination with crime-fighting machinery, and helped pioneer the use of the dictograph—a telephonic box that could be hidden in a room to pick up sounds and conversations. He collaborated with Walter G. Summers and Leonarde Keeler, the two men who separately birthed the modern lie detector. Schindler used the new device in several cases; in one, he caught the private maid who stole fifteenth-century paintings from her wealthy employer.
Schindler became famous. He loved to dance and he loved the New York City nightlife. He cofounded the Court of Last Resort—a precursor to the modern Innocence Project—and he was the president of the Adventurers Club of New York. He was called the most brilliant and charismatic investigator of his time. Yet he never once used a gun, and never even carried one. He worked in the dangerous underworlds of society, but he was otherwise a peaceful and optimistic man. When he was held up by an armed robber in Los Angeles, “my knees shook violently and I stammered, ‘Oh, no,’ ” Schindler recalled. “I was plenty scared.” He got out of it by handing the robber eighty dollars.
Schindler was married five times and had a son, Raymond Jr., and two daughters, Dorothy and Ruth. Later in his life, he took a job as supervisor of security for Ann Gould, daughter of the railroad magnate Jay Gould. She allowed Schindler and his fifth wife, Janice, to stay in the beautiful Spratt mansion, overlooking the Hudson in Tarrytown, New York, and across the way from Gould’s own mansion. Schindler lived there until his death from a heart ailment at the age of seventy.
The one murder case he would never have wanted to work happened eleven years after his passing.
In a ghastly echo of the Marie Smith murder, in January 1970, Schindler’s widow, Janice, was found savagely beaten to death, her nightgown pulled up, in the Tarrytown rooming house where she lived. Another boarder was arrested for the crime. One of her obituaries carried a photo of her and her beloved husband, Ray, wearing tropical shirts and smiling brightly on a cruise across the Atlantic.
After its early struggles, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People went on to become the most enduring and far-reaching civil rights organization in U.S. history.
After the Tom Williams case, it found more solid footing, opening branches in several cities and growing its membership. By 1919, the NAACP had ninety thousand members and three hundred branches. According to its website, Joel Spingarn, who served as its president for ten years, “formulated much of the strategy that fostered the organization’s growth.”
The range of matters the NAACP brought under its wing—police brutality, political lobbying, civic engagement, educational equality, criminal justice, health and social issues—is remarkable. Its greatest impact, however, may have happened in courtrooms. The NAACP’s lawyers prevailed in a long string of critical legal victories, none bigger than 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall. The unanimous nine–zero decision established that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Marshall, the grandson of a slave, became the first African American to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Today, the association has five hundred thousand members around the world, and an annual budget of $25 million.
In nearly every historical account, Ida B. Wells-Barnett is considered one of the founders of the NAACP.
Exactly fifty years after he bought five hundred acres of scrub oak and sand dunes by the Atlantic Ocean, James A. Bradley died in his Manhattan apartment, at 10:00 p.m. on June 6, 1921. He was ninety-one, and the cause of his death was cancer and bladder disease.
The city he created and sought to bend to his will mourned his passing and celebrated his life, and the newspaper he founded devoted its first two full pages to an appreciation of his vision and resolve. Clarence Hetrick, the former sheriff who became mayor of Asbury Park—largely on the strength of his role in the Marie Smith case—eulogized Bradley in the Asbury Park Evening Press: “He reared unto himself a monument that is everlasting… on the sands of the sea he builded a city. He left us a heritage of high ideals, of character eternal, of work accomplished and things done.”
The year Bradley died, officials commissioned a statue of him, lean and bearded, gazing out at the ocean, and placed it in Bradley Park, across from the Convention Hall, in the heart of Asbury Park. In recent years, there have been efforts to have the statue removed because of Bradley’s support of segregation. The statue has stayed, though the Asbury Park Historical Society did acknowledge Bradley’s history of racism.
So there he stands today, high above his boardwalk, in sight of the stretch of beach where he once sat with his black friend, John Baker, and dreamed of a bright and shining city, godly and free of sin.
As for the city Bradley actually did build, it is but a shell of the glittering resort it once was. The two hundred swank hotels, the carnival rides and dance halls, the Carousel and the Baby Parade—all gone. A shift to the suburbs, a 1970 race riot, new casinos in Atlantic City, crime, and poverty came together to turn Bradley’s paradise into something like a ghost town. There have been spurts of urban revival, even today, but what has been lost will likely never return. America does not spend its summers as it used to, with petticoats and parasols and carriage rides and fortune-tellers. Asbury Park is a city of shadows cast by its own past.
And the place in the world where Marie Smith’s body was found—the gloomy Wanamassa woods on the northern edge of town, by the sparkling waters of Deal Lake—is gone, too. Houses are there now.
Max Kruschka’s home and greenhouses are gone as well, replaced by an auto body shop. Whether or not Kruschka knew of Frank Heidemann’s crimes, or helped him in any way, remains unknown.
On March 21, 1931, Ida Wells-Barnett, then sixty-eight, wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. The next day, she skipped church and stayed in bed. Her husband, Ferdinand, noticed she did not look well—she was restless and burning up. He got her to a hospital, and she remained there, unconscious, for three days.
At 1:00 a.m. on March 25, Wells died of kidney disease.
Crowds filled and surrounded Chicago’s Metropolitan Church, where a simple, poignant memorial service was held. Her sons Charles and Henry helped carry her coffin, and a man sang a mournful ballad:
I’ve done my work, I’ve sung my song
I’ve done some good, I’ve done some wrong
And I shall go where I belong
The Lord has willed it so.
Long ago, Wells realized her strength lay in her stubbornness, and when the press remembered her, they remembered that strength. “Her militant attitude and uncompromising stand for racial rights made her an outstanding figure,” wrote the New York Age, while the Oakland Tribune said, “she was great because she was fearless… she was one of the greatest Negro women the world has ever produced.”
The New York Times chose not to run an obituary for Wells—a mistake they acknowledged eighty-seven years later, admitting that for more than a century “obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men.” As recompense, the paper ran a belated tribute:
Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice, a disease infecting Americans from coast to coast. She pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism. And as a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement.
Ida Wells was, in simplest terms, a participant in the battle. She refused to be told how things were, when she could use her own eyes and ears to determine the truth. “When we had a riot in Chicago, she went out every day,” her daughter Alfreda M. Duster recalled in an interview years later. “Everyone else was disposed to be holing up and boarding up, but she wanted to be in the action. She wanted to see for herself.”
This, too, was Wells’s message to the downtrodden—you have more power than you know, and your power is in your individuality, the richness of your divinity, the glory of your humanity. “My mother had a constant drive and desire to make conditions better,” Duster said, “so that persons would have an opportunity to fulfill their own potential.”
Ida Wells wrote names where before there were none. She demanded the admission that the lynching victims she fought so hard for were once beautiful human beings, with families and dreams and loves and hopes, each a unique child of God, each far more than their struggles and suffering, each flowing with beauty and talent and song. She did this by using the language of her oppressors—who called the black race savage, beastly, barbaric—and flipping it to apply to the practices of oppression. It was the slavers and lynchers who were savages. It was their doings that were demonic.
And the men and women of her race—these were not beasts to be extinguished by “person or persons unknown.” There was true greatness and unfathomable grace in what they endured, in what they overcame, in how they grasped at the tools of freedom and pushed their bloodlines through time and history, until their power and culture came to matter, and they began to claim as theirs what rightfully belonged to them.
This was the blessed work of Ida Wells, and this is the brilliant idea that persists:
We are never better than when we give our voice to the voiceless, our strength to the weak, our lives to the battle between the darkness and the light.