The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  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.

  CHAPTER 27 Frog James

  August 14, 1908

  Springfield, Illinois

  Three years later, in August 1908, a terrible, three-day spasm of violence struck Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln. It was a scene of the bitterest hatred and bloodshed, involving thousands, a race riot of ghastly scope and horror. It was, one newspaper reported, a flat-out “war between the negroes and the white man.” While the city of Springfield prepared for the upcoming centennial of Lincoln’s birth, its streets were suddenly overrun, its stores set ablaze, its citizens plunged into anarchy. “As the blood red prairie sun sank tonight into the fields of waving corn that hedge about the city,” one reporter wrote, “where lie the bones of him who said: ‘With charity for all and malice toward none,’ the people trembled with terror and alarm.”

  The riot, triggered by a white woman’s allegation that a black man pulled her out of bed and tried to rape her, included some five thousand white citizens, many armed with axes and hatchets, rampaging through the Levee and the Badlands, the two black neighborhoods in Springfield, laying waste to black businesses and burning down homes. Just blocks from the two-story, twelve-room house where Lincoln had lived, angry rioters chanted, “Lincoln freed you, we will show you where you belong.”

  In three days of rioting, many dozens of black homes and businesses were destroyed, and at least sixteen people were killed, nine black and seven white. The 1908 Springfield Race Riot was a cruel reminder that, four decades after Lincoln freed the slaves, the once-improving plight of blacks was being forcefully and often violently reversed, the subjugation of slavery replaced by the determined quashing of black enterprise, community, and life. “Springfield’s riot occurred in the context of the steady and marked deterioration of blacks’ security in the United States that began in the late 19th century and continued after 1908,” wrote the professor and author Roberta Senechal de la Roche in her study of the event. “Race riots and lynching represented the most extreme attempts by whites to subordinate blacks.”

  Here was the core of Ida Wells’s antilynching crusade—the reality that mob violence against blacks was primarily a means of economic suppression. Despite Wells’s years and years of work and sweat, and all the national attention she had drawn to the issue, lynching and suppression of black businesses and communities remained a governing practice across the country. The number of mob killings had dropped—89 of them in 1908, down from 161 in 1892—but there still existed a barbaric and relentless appetite for such crimes. For the three decades surrounding the turn of the century, an average of one black American was lynched every four days.

  The Springfield Riot triggered a series of smaller acts of anti-colored violence around the country. Abraham Lincoln’s damaged hometown had not yet been fully repaired when, one year later, 160 miles south of Springfield, another mob gathered in Cairo, Illinois, a poor former railroad town by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

  * * *

  Katherine Boren, three years old, was playing in the alleyway behind her family’s home in Cairo when she saw something frightening. She ran home to tell her mother, and her mother called the police.

  There in the narrow alley lay the crumpled, naked body of Mary Pelley, a white, twenty-four-year-old shopgirl. Beside her lay her broken umbrella. She had been dragged into the alley, raped, and murdered. Town officials quickly announced a one-thousand-dollar reward for the capture of her killer, and sent for bloodhounds from a nearby city.

  Before nightfall, six black men were in custody.

  One of them was William James, who was known to everyone as “Frog” or “Froggie,” and who worked as a driver for the Cairo Ice and Coal Company. There wasn’t any physical evidence against him, except for his size and bulk, which police said justified naming him the main suspect and locking him away in a cell.

  The next night, the town’s rage over Pelley’s murder began to boil. Separate mobs, each hundreds of people thick, swarmed the courthouse, police station, and Frog James’s house.

  The Alexander County sheriff, Frank E. Davis, feared the worst. Before dawn on November 10, Davis and his deputy, Thomas Fuller, snuck James out of the jail and onto an Illinois Central train heading north. They got as far as the Donegal station, twenty-seven miles north of Cairo, before hearing about mobs gathering at depots along the train route. Davis and Fuller rushed James off the train and into the woods of the town of Karnac. They walked for twenty-four hours without food or water, and finally lay down on the side of a hill to rest.

  A man hunting in the woods recognized Sheriff Davis, and knew right away whom he had stumbled upon. Word spread fast, and before long one thousand people were on the hill.

  Sheriff Davis protested as the mob encircled him, but he was ignored. A man slipped a rope around James’s neck and dragged him down into town. The mob commandeered a Big Four Route train at the depot in Belknap and brought James back to Cairo.

  There another five thousand men and women were waiting at the station. The massive horde marched James to the center of town, “sweeping the streets like a flock of sheep might tread a narrow lane,” one witness said, until they arrived at the most public place in Cairo—a towering steel arch strung with electric lights across Eighth and Commercial Streets.

  It was the women in the mob—friends and relatives of Pelley, the wives of prominent town officials, even elderly church workers—who led the assault. According to one report, a gray-haired woman got up in front of the mob and delivered a rousing call to violence: “Men, men—and women, too—will you be cowards? Will you see a black demon escape? Will you see your daughters murdered by a black fiend? I call on you to take this Negro murderer and give him the fate he deserves.”

  The arch lights were switched on, and a rope was hoisted high over its top. Hundreds of women got their hands on the rope an
d pulled James, pleading for mercy, into the air. Before the rope could strangle the life out of him, it snapped, and James fell to the ground.

  The instant he landed, “hundreds of revolvers flashed and 500 bullets crashed into the quivering form of the negro,” one newspaper reported. “The riddled dead man was then dragged through the streets of the city to the spot where the Pelley girl was assaulted and slain.”

  There someone sawed off Frog James’s head, stuck it on the end of a pike, and held it up for all to see. Someone else set the bloodied corpse on fire, and the mob cheered and howled at the flames. Later, when all that remained was a charred mass, members of the mob took it apart with knives and bare hands, keeping parts of Frog James—an ear, a finger, a bone—as souvenirs of their triumphant day.

  * * *

  Illinois governor Charles Deneen placed Cairo under martial law. He ordered the National Guard and ten companies of militia to the town. By one estimate, as many as ten thousand people formed the mob that effectively took control of Cairo for a full day, rendering it lawless. That figure represented every white citizen of Cairo, plus another one thousand people from elsewhere. Governor Deneen called the incident “an outrageous proceeding and a disgrace to the State of Illinois.”

  But the governor had another obligation. Under the terms of Edward Green’s 1905 Suppression of Mob Violence Act, the governor was bound to dismiss Frank E. Davis as sheriff of Alexander County for allowing a prisoner in his custody to be lynched.

  At the opposite end of Illinois, nearly four hundred miles north of Cairo, the Chicago newspapers graphically covered the horror of Frog James’s lynching. When Ida Wells learned of it, she searched for news about Sheriff Davis, to see if he’d already been dismissed. He hadn’t been.