The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  When she was a teacher, Wells understood the job to include serving as a counselor to those in need of guidance, not unlike the job of pastor. A teacher should be a resource for the community beyond his or her work in the classroom. A teacher, Wells wrote, was supposed to be “a leader.” In her early years in the profession, Wells shied away from that side of the job, because she believed she was too young: “As a green girl in my teens, I was no help to the people outside of the schoolroom.”

  Yet even before she developed the confidence she needed to step into the role, Wells had grown dismayed with the perceived leaders in her community—the pastors and preachers. While attending the A.M.E. Church in Memphis, Wells listened to sermons and wondered why “the preachers did not give the people practical talks. I had already found that people needed guidance in everyday life, and that the leaders, the preachers, were not giving them this help.” Instead, Wells wrote, people “would come to me with their problems” because she was a teacher.

  Wells recognized this void in leadership—this absence of material guidance in combating real, day-to-day problems—and made it one of the core themes that eventually defined her career. She simply believed that leaders needed to do more to help their followers. First through the Lyceum, and then through her encounters as editor of the Evening Star, Wells found the means—and the nerve—to try to fill that void.

  With no training as a writer or journalist or editor, Wells transformed the Evening Star. She wrote stories and essays and news items about current events and concerns, and she grew the following of both the paper and the Memphis Lyceum. She felt she had few “literary gifts and graces,” yet she was confident in her observational skills. “I had thought much about conditions as I had seen them in the country schools and churches,” she wrote, “and I had an instinctive feeling that the people who had little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way.” Her style of writing, therefore, was “plain and common sense.”

  One visitor to the Memphis Lyceum, where the Evening Star was read aloud, was Robert Countee, a Baptist pastor. Countee published a weekly paper of his own called the Living Way. He asked Wells to write for it, and for her first assignment he asked her to cover a local lawsuit. The article, one critic wrote, revealed Wells to be “a writer of superb ability, and demands for her services began to come in.”

  Over the next three years, Wells wrote more articles and columns for an array of outlets—the Living Way; the New York Age; the Detroit Plaindealer; the Indianapolis World; the Little Rock Sun; the Chattanooga Justice; the Memphis Watchman, among others. She wrote under the pen name Iola, which may have referred to a misspelling of Ida. Most likely the name was a way to create an identity separate from her role as a teacher, so that her opinions as a columnist might not endanger her job.

  “Iola” wrote dispatches from her travels to different cities and landmarks, as well as thinly fictionalized stories that reflected her life. Many of her pieces dealt with the same subject—the failure of leaders, both white and black, to do enough for those in need of their help and guidance. She named and called out black politicians, shop owners, and pastors, and she developed a pointed and stinging style of criticism. “Ida was not the only journalist who wrote such acerbic prose,” according to her biographer Paula Giddings, “but in a period when most female journalists wrote more mundane ‘women’s columns,’ she was the only woman to do so with such intensity and sarcasm.”

  Incredibly, none of her work as a journalist had been paid. That changed when William J. Simmons, president of the National Colored Press Association and publisher of the American Baptist newspaper, tracked Wells down and asked her to join the Baptist as a weekly correspondent, with pay. “He offered me the lavish sum of one dollar weekly,” Wells wrote. “It was the first time anyone had offered to pay me for work I enjoyed doing.”

  The boldness glimpsed in Wells’s landmark case against the railroads in 1883 was gaining dimension. Wells, not yet thirty years old, was emerging in her community and across the country as a distinctive and audacious writer, and more—an influential journalist, a provocative critic, a conveyer of ideas, a motivator to action. “She has become famous as one of the few of our women who handle our goose quill with diamond point as easily as any man in newspaper work,” wrote T. Thomas Fortune, the owner of the popular black newspaper the New York Age. “She has plenty of nerve and is as sharp as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy for humbug.”

  And yet Wells had still to find her full, authentic voice. She was still young, and she questioned her writing skills, especially the “dreary sameness” and “monotonous” style of her articles. She complained in her diary about “a paucity of ideas.” She also wrestled with the side of her that first emerged after her parents’ deaths—the fierceness of her spirit and her ready sense of indignation. She thought of her anger as “my besetting sin,” as if the rage she felt about perceived injustices was something that needed to be tempered, or even snuffed out.

  But her thinking would change—her moment would come. Events would demand more and more of her. Some furies and indignations, the times would teach her, were not sins at all.

  * * *

  These were the existential questions that all prominent black thinkers had to address in the decades after the Civil War—what is the right response to the continuing suppression of black people in America? To the systemic repression of black businesses? To Jim Crow laws and all-white juries? To violent resistance to integration? To the rise of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan? To the bedrock principle of white supremacy that permeated the South?

  To the very notion that the grand, healing experiment known as Reconstruction had, in the quarter century after Abraham Lincoln’s murder, not healed the country’s wounds at all, and perhaps even made them worse, at least for black Americans?

  Most urgently: What was the right response to the most horrific and damaging method of suppressing the black race of all—the terroristic and inhuman practice of lynching?

  Lynching—a term thought to derive from a Revolutionary era Virginian named Charles Lynch, a local court manager who aggressively jailed British supporters without proper jurisdiction—came to refer to any extrajudicial killing of an individual by a group, usually in public. In the United States many lynchings were hangings, but victims were also shot, burned, beaten, and dragged through streets. Racial lynchings existed throughout the history of slavery in America, but they intensified after slavery was abolished and blacks were given the right to vote. By one estimate, the KKK alone was involved in four hundred lynchings in the United States between 1868 and 1871. The majority of all lynching victims were black.

  The matter of how to confront lynching was tied to the larger question of how to assert the place of black people in American society. Was the answer retribution and aggression, or a philosophy of dialogue and alliance-making? The most prominent black leader of the nineteenth century, the former slave and brilliant orator Frederick Douglass, believed in a mix of resistance and integration—“an egalitarian ethos of inclusion and a robust conception of mutual responsibility,” as one historian phrased it. He saw the place of blacks in society as equal to and interdependent on the white race—a dual emphasis on blacks becoming self-reliant, and whites becoming acclimated, through moral suasion, to the concept of social justice.

  Other black leaders, however, believed in compulsion over suasion. One such thinker was T. Thomas Fortune, whose newspaper, the New York Age, was likely the country’s most influential black-owned newspaper in the 1880s. Born into slavery, Fortune was self-taught and never took a class until he enrolled in college. There he considered studying law but switched to journalism, and quickly rose to prominence because of his confrontational style. Fortune laid out his core philosophy in a heralded 1883 essay, “The Virtue of Agitation.”

  “There is no half way ground between right and wrong,” he wrote. “The
one or the other must obtain, and prevail. Mental inertia is death. Indifferent acquiescence in wrong is death. Tame submission to outrage is death. Agitation, constant protesting, always standing up to be counted, to be heard, or to be knocked down—this spirit breeds respect and dulls the edge of tyranny.”

  More pointedly: “If others use the weapon of violence to combat our peaceful argument, it is not for us to run away from violence. A man’s a man, and what is worth having is worth fighting for.”

  There it was, the choice—peaceful, deliberate mutual integration, or aggression and agitation in pursuit of equality?

  Ida Wells, in her early years as a journalist, did not come down forcefully on either side. By her own admission, she had a narrow view of the causes and dynamics of lynching, believing that they were primarily brought about by white women accusing black men of rape. “Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South,” Wells wrote, “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 of course, not all lynching had to do with rape. The notorious 1886 massacre of thirteen black men by a white mob in a courtroom in Carrollton, Mississippi—after the men became witnesses for black defendants accused of attacking a white lawyer—was as shocking a crime as had occurred in the South since the Civil War, and led to mass protests across the country. Still, these terroristic and horrific murders, which happened just 125 miles south of Memphis, did not inspire Wells to produce any article or column or opinion about them, other than to write in her diary, “O God, when will these massacres stop?”

  In 1889, two partners of the Memphis Free Speech & Headlight, a newspaper published in the basement of the Beale Street Church in Memphis, invited Wells to join the paper as an editor. Wells agreed, but only if she was made an equal partner with the two men, Taylor Nightingale and J. L. Fleming. Less than a year later, T. Thomas Fortune was one of the first people to commend Wells on her work for the paper—which, thanks to Wells’s tireless travels through the South promoting the Free Speech at church conventions and lodge gatherings, had seen its circulation rise from fifteen hundred to four thousand.

  Fortune admired Wells and followed her career. Wells did the same. She was certainly aware of his radical ideas, and considered Fortune a mentor. He would become one of two men to have a profound and dynamic influence on Wells’s views on racial strife in America—and particularly on lynchings—in the years after the Free Speech gave Wells her biggest public platform yet.

  The other man who changed Wells forever was her friend Thomas Moss, one of the black men arrested after the trouble at the Curve.

  CHAPTER 16 Turn Our Faces to the West

  March 9, 1892

  Memphis, Tennessee

  Just about every black resident in the Curve knew and liked Thomas Moss. He was a postal carrier and he made regular stops in most homes and stores, and if there was any news in town—a tussle, a romance—Tommie Moss knew it before most people, and he didn’t mind sharing it along his route.

  Moss was diligent and enterprising. He opened a bank account at thirteen, apprenticed as a barber, and later passed a civil servants exam to work as a mail carrier. He saved enough money to buy his own home, and to join ten other black investors in a new collective, the People’s Grocery. The store was designed to cater to the growing black population in Memphis, and to compete against the only other grocery store in the Curve—the one owned by William Barrett. The men chose Tommie Moss to be the store’s president.

  One of Moss’s best friends in Memphis was Ida Wells. They met while he was delivering mail to her Free Speech office on Beale Street, not far from where he worked nights at the People’s Grocery. They grew so close that Moss asked Wells to be godmother to Maurine, his young daughter with his wife, Betty. “A finer, cleaner man,” Wells wrote, “never walked the streets of Memphis.”

  Wells was away in Natchez, Mississippi, promoting the Free Speech, when violence broke out at the Curve on March 2, 1892. She would have to read and hear about what happened after Moss was arrested, and several men in black hoods quietly pushed their way into the Shelby County Jail, where twenty-seven black men were locked up, around 2:00 a.m. on March 9. As the newspapers reported it, the night watchman, O’Donnell, told the masked men he didn’t have the keys to the jail cells, and a rough search proved that he didn’t. Two of the intruders bound O’Donnell’s hands and stayed watch over him, while two others invaded the main jail office and found the keys on a table.

  Then the men went to the cells and searched in darkness for their three main targets—Will Stewart, Calvin McDowell, and Thomas Moss.

  Finally, they found the cell they were looking for. A key went into a lock. Thomas Moss was pulled from his cell, a hand over his mouth, and he was bound and gagged with rope. Stewart and McDowell were next. The three were rushed out of the jail and marched down Auction Street, toward the Mississippi River. The mob reached the tracks of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad—the very railroad Ida Wells sued—and headed north along the tracks, into the pitch-blackness of a moonless night.

  They stopped in an empty and desolate brickyard near Wolf River.

  The men in hoods ungagged the men, and Thomas Moss was first to speak. By one account he begged to be spared and pleaded on behalf of his daughter and unborn son, Thomas Jr. By another, he was defiant.

  “If you’re going to kill us,” Moss was quoted as saying, “turn our faces to the west.”

  As if to say, There is no justice for us here, in the South. Let us at least gaze upon our future as free men, someplace else.

  The sharp crack of a revolver. The bullet piercing Thomas Moss’s cheek. A cascade of shots, deafening. “A terrible volley was poured in among the shivering negroes, who instantly fell dead in their tracks,” reported the Indianapolis Journal. “The bodies presented a horrible sight.”

  Calvin McDowell’s jaw was shot clean off, leaving him with a massive hole in the back of his head. Because he grabbed the hot muzzle of a shotgun in self-defense, his right hand had been blasted off. An eyeball hung from its socket. Will Stewart was shot in the mouth and the back of his head, “and his body was riddled with buckshot,” the Journal wrote. Thomas Moss had an ear shot off and a row of bullet holes in his forehead. Twenty-five shots were fired in just three seconds’ time.

  One newspaper called it a “Wholesale Lynching.” Another: “The Curse of the Southland.” By all accounts, the lynchings were orderly and efficient, with no hollering or celebrations, the vengeance workmanlike. An inquest determined the black men “were shot to death by parties unknown to the jury.” White looters ransacked the People’s Grocery, stripping its shelves and forcing its shuttering and bankruptcy. The store’s remaining stock was sold to William Barrett, the rival grocer, for less than eighteen cents on the dollar.

  Just a few weeks later, Thomas Moss Jr. was born fatherless.

  * * *

  The gruesome slaughter of her friend affected Ida Wells like no other lynching. “The shock to the colored people who knew and loved [the three men] was beyond description,” she wrote of the murders, citing William Barrett as the main instigator. “With the aid of the city and county authorities, and the daily papers, that white grocer had indeed put an end to his rival Negro grocer as well as to his business.”

  That the white mob ended not only the lives of three black men but also their thriving business clarified for Wells the driving force behind the insidious evil of lynching—not accusations of rape, or any crime at all, but the need to keep her race economically subjugated.

  “Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart had been lynched in Memphis, one of the leading cities of the South, in which no lynching had taken place before, with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; and they had committed no crime against white women,” W
ells wrote. “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.’ ”

  The calls by T. Thomas Fortune to meet violence with action, and the unavenged murder of her friend Tommie Moss, transformed Wells from a critic to an activist. Finally, she used the weapons of her voice and platform to articulate a decisive response to the issue that had once seemed too big for her. Now, like Fortune, she would issue a call to action—not violent retribution, not a race riot, but action, strong and impactful. Her advice to the black community in Memphis was based on Thomas Moss’s poignant last words—“turn our faces to the west.”

  “The City of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival,” Wells wrote in her first editorial in the Free Speech following the killings. “There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are outnumbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without delay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left that we can do—save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood.”

  Hers was not the first call for blacks to leave the South and look for prosperity elsewhere. There had been other emigrations—black citizens by the thousands fleeing southern states and heading north. Now Memphis would see its own exodus. Pastors like Rev. R. N. Countee, who helped start Wells’s writing career, left the city and took their entire congregations with them, heading to Oklahoma, where great swaths of land were being opened and sold. Those who couldn’t afford train tickets packed wagons and left that way. A group of three hundred blacks set out on ferries across the Mississippi, bid good-bye and good luck by hundreds of black citizens on the shore. “The last person to go aboard the ferry boat was a horny-handed son of toil who led a yellow hound,” Wells reported. “As he started up the gangplank the dog pulled back. His master, seeing that he had the center stage for a moment, yelled, ‘Come on here—what you want to stay back there for, want the white folks to lynch you, too?’ ”