The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  “All the colored friends in Cairo are friends of Mr. Davis, and they seem to feel that because his successor, a Democrat, has turned out all the Republican deputies, they owe their duty to the party to ask the return of a Republican sheriff. But not one of these, Mr. Davis’s friends, would say that for one moment, he had his prisoner in the county jail, where the law demands that he should be placed, or that he swore in a single deputy to help protect his life until he could be tried by law.

  “It looked like encouragement to the mob to have the chief law officer in the county take that man up in the woods and keep him until the mob got big enough to come after him. I repeat, Governor, that if this man is reinstated, it will simply mean an increase of lynchings in the state of Illinois, and an encouragement to mob violence.”

  With that, Wells sat down.

  It was late in the afternoon, and all the testimony from both sides had been given. That should have been the end of the reinstatement hearing. But it wasn’t.

  Governor Deneen had something to say. He announced that he wanted the two opposing parties to get together and agree upon a statement of fact regarding the lynching in Cairo. And since he had to leave town the following day, he needed the parties to reconvene at the statehouse at 8:00 that night. Davis’s lawyer, Walter Warder, was not pleased.

  “He and his party expected to go through the form of presenting that petition, and then taking the afternoon train back to Cairo, arriving there in time for dinner,” Wells observed. “Instead, we had to have night session, which would necessitate them remaining over” in Springfield.

  Warder took Wells’s petition and threw it across the table—“like a bone to a dog,” Wells said—and told the governor there was nothing more to discuss. Deneen disagreed. They would reconvene at 8:00 p.m., he repeated. Wells, who had skipped lunch, was “quite willing to go home and get something to eat,” she recalled.

  But as she was on her way out of the chamber, the men who had been surrounding Frank Davis stopped her before she could go.

  One of the men took Wells’s hand in his, and shook it.

  “Congratulations on that wonderful speech,” he said.

  Another man shook her hand and said the same thing. An Illinois state’s attorney, Alexander Wilson, asked her if she was a lawyer. The land commissioner told her, “Whether you’re a lawyer or not, you made the best speech of the day. And you were up against the biggest lawyer in southern Illinois.”

  Finally, to Wells’s surprise, Frank Davis himself came over.

  “I bear you no grudge for what you have done, Mrs. Barnett,” he said. Then he shook her hand and walked out of the chamber.

  * * *

  They reconvened at the capitol at 8:00 p.m.

  Wells noticed that the men in fine suits sitting with Frank Davis were less boisterous, less confident than they had appeared in earlier sessions. “There was all the difference in the world in their attitude,” she wrote.

  The hearing began. Walter Warder and Alexander Wilson had drawn up a statement of facts, and it was presented to Wells for her signature. Instead, she took a pen and began to cross out words.

  “What are you doing?” Wilson asked.

  “I am not a lawyer,” Wells said, “but I do know a statement of fact when I see one.”

  The document drawn up by Wilson read, “The sheriff, fearing an outbreak by the mob, took ‘Frog’ to the railroad station.” Wells drew a line through “fearing an outbreak by the mob.”

  “That is his opinion, rather than a fact,” she said.

  Wilson turned red and grumbled, but let it go.

  Two hours later, the revised statement of facts was complete. The governor, waiting in his stately office in the capitol, asked the parties to come back the next morning to offer any final arguments.

  Early the following day, Wells marched back up the steps of the State Capitol Building. The local Springfield attorney, Morris Williams, was by her side once again. At the building’s entrance, Walter Warder and the rest of Frank Davis’s legal team were waiting for Wells. When she approached, they took off their hats, out of respect for her.

  “Mrs. Barnett, we have decided that if you are willing, we won’t make another argument over this matter, but we will submit it all for the governor’s action,” Warder said.

  It seemed no one wished to give Wells another chance to speak.

  “Whatever my lawyer advises, that is what I will do,” she said, handing the statement of facts to Morris Williams. Williams looked it over, and agreed it could be submitted directly to the governor.

  And so it was. The hearing was over, and Charles Deneen would deliver his verdict in a few days. On the way out of the Capitol, Williams turned to Wells as they walked down the formidable steps.

  “Oh, the governor’s going to send him back,” he said, meaning Deneen would surely reinstate Frank Davis. After all, Deneen owed a debt to the many friends and political supporters who had helped him get elected, nearly all of who were in favor of reinstating Davis. Very few people believed Deneen would turn his back on the political machine that swept him into office.

  “I don’t see how he can help it with such terrific pressure being brought to bear to have him to do so,” Williams told Wells. “But, by George, if I had time to dig up the law I would have furnished him so much of it that he wouldn’t dare do so.”

  Wells paused and considered her kind, new friend—the only one who, out of nothing more than a passion for the cause, had been there with her for the most important speech she would ever give in her life.

  “We have done the best we could under the circumstances,” Wells told him. “Angels could do no more.”

  They said good-bye, and Wells got on a train and headed home.

  * * *

  Governor Charles Deneen announced his final decision on the morning of December 6. It was one of the longest decisions he’d ever written as governor.

  “The sole question presented is, does the evidence show that the said Frank E. Davis, as Sheriff of Alexander County, did all in his power to protect the life of the prisoners and perform the duties required of him by existing laws for the protection of prisoners?” Deneen asked. After all, Davis had the authority to deputize, and arm, as many citizens as he wished—ten, twenty, thirty, more. By law, no one eighteen or older could refuse his order to join the posse comitatus. What’s more, Davis and his deputies would be “justified in taking life should these riotous persons refuse to disperse,” Deneen wrote. The sheriff could also ask the governor to send as many National Guardsmen as needed—in fact, two militia companies happened to be stationed near Cairo, and could have been in the town within hours.

  Frank Davis, Deneen noted, did none of these things.

  Instead, he “took his prisoner almost without protection outside the County.” Because of that, there was only one decision he, as governor, could reach: “Measured with these standards, it does not appear that Frank E. Davis, as Sheriff of Alexander County, did all in his power for the protection of the prisoners.

  “Mob violence has no place in Illinois,” Deneen concluded. “It is denounced in every line of the Constitution and in every Statute. Instead of breeding respect for the law, it breeds contempt. For the suppression of mob violence, our legislature has spoken in no uncertain terms.

  “I must deny the petition of said Frank E. Davis for reinstatement as Sheriff of Alexander County.”

  Ida Wells had won her case.

  The governor then appointed Fred D. Nellis, the county treasurer, to replace Frank Davis as county sheriff. Back in Chicago, the Bethel Literary and Historical Club convened a meeting and raised the grand sum of thirteen dollars and twenty-five cents, which they sent to Ida Wells to reimburse her for the cost of her trip to southern Illinois.

  CHAPTER 31 Rope and Coal Oil

  August 1910

  Chicago, Illinois

  A few months later, Ida Wells spent part of a midsummer morning at home, reading a newspaper. One story stoo
d out.

  It was about Steve Green, a black tenant farmer who had fled Arkansas a few steps ahead of the law. There had been a disagreement with a white landlord, Will Saddler, and Saddler shot a fleeing Green in the neck. Green grabbed a rifle and fired back, and Saddler was dead. Green left the state and moved from town to town in Illinois, hoping to escape the certain lynching that awaited him in Arkansas.

  Then police caught Green in Chicago. A black friend betrayed him and turned him in. Officers put him in a jail cell and went to work on him. “Three times afterward they put me in a sweatbox for a day and a night, and gave me neither food nor drink for four days,” Green told a reporter. In time, police wrangled a confession from him, and made arrangements to send him back to Arkansas.

  In his cell, Green said, “I got to thinking what they had done to other colored men who had tried to defend themselves, and what they would do to me. It seemed to me I’d rather kill myself than wait to be burned, hanged, and shot by them.”

  And so, when his jailers weren’t watching, Steve Green ate the tips of several matches, hoping the chemicals on them would kill him. When they didn’t, he swallowed bits of ground glass. Police finally strapped him to a chair so he wouldn’t try to kill himself again.

  Ida Wells read the article and was moved by the details. That a man would swallow glass because of his dread of white justice struck her as especially heartbreaking. She also knew Steve Green was right—if he was returned to Arkansas, he almost surely would be lynched. She had seen it happen many times before, most recently in the Frog James case—a suspect pulled from police custody and hanged by an angry mob.

  Now, here was another potential, even probable lynching, unfolding slowly in real time. Wells did not want to see it happen.

  She put down the paper, picked up the telephone, and made a call.

  * * *

  One year earlier, Wells received an invitation to attend a three-day conference in New York City.

  The conference, sponsored by a small group called the Committee on the Status of the Negro, was intended to outline a course of action in the cause of black rights. An even smaller group of people—five in all—had, only a few months earlier, led an effort that sparked the creation of the committee. They were, to varying degrees, active in the cause of black rights, and they were eager to make an even bigger difference. Still, they did not realize that they were changing history.

  All five of these people were white.

  They came together in the wake of the Springfield Riot of 1908. A young activist named William English Walling, born in Kentucky to wealthy parents, had spent time in Springfield and was horrified by reports of violence there. He and his wife traveled to the city in the middle of the three-day riot, and Walling wrote about what he saw.

  “We at once discovered, to our amazement, that Springfield has no shame,” Walling wrote in his article, “The Race War in the North,” published in the Independent newspaper in September 1908. “She stood for the action of the mob. She hoped the rest of the negroes might flee.”

  In fact, many hundreds of blacks did leave Springfield after the riots, most driven out by continued threats and pressure from the city’s white citizens. Walling closed his powerful piece with a plea for action.

  “Who realizes the seriousness of the situation, and what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their aid?”

  What large and powerful body?

  In New York City, a Brooklyn-born suffragist, Mary White Ovington, read Walling’s article and felt so moved she sat down and wrote him a letter that very hour. Ovington was already deeply involved in black causes, and was living in a black tenement as part of her work as a social reformer. She and Walling arranged to meet in the first week of January 1909, in Walling’s small New York City apartment.

  Another reformer, Henry Moskowitz, joined them for the meeting. A fourth activist, Charles Edward Russell, a friend of Walling’s, was set to be there but couldn’t make it. “We spent the afternoon discussing the race question,” Ovington later wrote, “and deciding on people to form a committee” to launch the movement Walling suggested in his article.

  Afterward, they drafted a fifth person, Oswald Garrison Villard, the white editor of the New York Evening Post, to bring the number of their small group to five.

  Villard, whose grandfather was the well-known abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, was also already active in the cause of civil rights. He was excited by the idea of a national organization, and he wrote a rallying cry entitled “The Call,” and made space in his newspaper to publish it. He cited the urgent need for a national conference “for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.”

  Such a committee came to be formed, the Committee on the Status of the Negro, and the group of five invited Ida Wells and six other prominent black citizens—as well as five times as many white citizens—to be part of it. Wells agreed to join the committee and attend its inaugural conference on May 31, 1909, in the Charity Organization Hall, on New York City’s East 22nd Street.

  * * *

  The National Negro Conference, attended by some three hundred people, was contentious. Political fault lines in the movement split the committee. Some organizers believed any national black association had no chance of being effective without the leadership, or at least the support, of Booker T. Washington, the charismatic, Alabama-born educator and orator who was then the most popular black leader in the country. Others wanted to move away from Washington’s emphasis on job training over education and activism.

  One such Washington critic was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first black man to earn a graduate degree from Harvard, and a history, economics, and sociology professor at Atlanta University.

  Du Bois, who in 1905 cofounded his own civil rights organization, the Niagara Movement, believed in a much more radical approach to progress than did Washington. He demanded economic and social equality for blacks, and insisted on respect for the pride and humanity of his race. The schism between the two factions—those who preached patient, practical progress, and those who agitated for quicker change—threatened to throw the National Negro Conference into chaos.

  Ida Wells, whose two decades of activism made her a natural ally to Du Bois, worked behind the scenes to assure people that Washington’s supporters would not take over the conference, and possibly the new organization. She “tried to allay the [fear] by asserting that most of those present were believers in Dr. Du Bois’s ideas,” she wrote. Her assurances worked, and she was proven right: Washington did not attend the conference, while Du Bois assumed a prominent role.

  The first day of the conference, May 31, was given over to speeches. There was a lecture on the myth of black inferiority to whites, and a talk from Du Bois on economics and politics. Ida Wells gave a version of her speech about lynching, and referred to the practice as “color-line murder.” She sharpened her core argument that the purported justification for mob violence—black men attacking white women—“is the excuse, not the cause.” And she broadened her scope as a nod to the goals of the conference. Lynching, she said, “[i]s a national crime, and requires a national remedy.”

  The second day’s agenda was more troubling for Wells.

  The order of business was to choose the members of an elite Committee of Forty on Permanent Organization, to be composed of the activists, advocates, and thinkers—some white, some black—most trusted to push a national movement forward.

  Loud arguments about who should be on the committee continued up to midnight. Wells, however, was certain that after all of the arguing, she had been picked to be one of the Forty.

  “I had seen the list of names,” she wrote of the moments before the Forty were announced. “I had been elected.”

  Finally, after midnight, Du Bois—the only black person on a seven-member selection committee entrusted with picking the Forty—stood up in front of the thinned-out audien
ce and read the names of the chosen.

  “Then,” Wells wrote, “bedlam broke loose, for although I had assured my friends that my name had been among those chosen, when Dr. Du Bois finished his list, my name had not been called.”

  It was true—at the very last moment Wells had been cut from the committee. In Charity Hall, there was outrage. Other omissions and selections angered different factions, but leaving Wells off the list was, to many, a complete shock. Wells, too, was stunned, “but I put the best face possible on the matter,” she wrote, “and turned to leave.”

  She made it as far as the aisle before a flustered organizer, John Milholland, stopped her.

  “Mrs. Barnett, I want to tell you that when that list of names left our hands and was given to Dr. Du Bois to read, your name led all the rest,” he said. Omitting her name, he added, was “unthinkable.”

  Wells replied that it was clear someone did not want her on the committee, and “that as far as I was concerned I would carry on just as I had done.” Then she pushed through the front door and left.

  Now she made it to the sidewalk before the conference secretary, May Nerney, ran up and stopped her.

  “Mrs. Barnett,” Nerney said, “they want you to come back.”

  Wells refused, and instead sent in the friend who was accompanying her. She waited outside on the sidewalk, from where, she would recall, she watched Mary White Ovington, one of the original five, and a vocal participant in the debates over the Forty, “sweep by me with an air of triumph, and a very pleased look on her face.”

  Before long, Wells was persuaded to come back inside. Du Bois offered an unconvincing explanation that he had dropped her name in order to squeeze in someone he felt needed to be on the committee—a member of his own Niagara Movement. Years later, Mary White Ovington would write that Ida Wells was “fitted for courageous work, but perhaps not fitted to accept the restraint of organization.”