Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity. In many instances the leading citizens aid and abet by their presence when they do not participate, and the leading journals inflame the public mind to the lynching point with scare-head articles and offers of rewards. Whenever a burning is advertised to take place, the railroads run excursions, photographs are taken, and the same jubilee is indulged in that characterized the public hangings of one hundred years ago. There is, however, this difference: in those old days the multitude that stood by was permitted only to guy or jeer. The nineteenth-century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd. If the leaders of the mob are so minded, coal-oil is poured over the body and the victim is then roasted to death. This has been done in Texarkana and Paris, Tex., in Bardswell, Ky., and in Newman, Ga. In Paris the officers of the law delivered the prisoner to the mob. The mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being burned to death. In Texarkana, the year before, men and boys amused themselves by cutting off strips of flesh and thrusting knives into their helpless victim. At Newman, Ga., of the present year, the mob tried every conceivable torture to compel the victim to cry out and confess, before they set fire to the faggots that burned him. But their trouble was all in vain—he never uttered a cry, and they could not make him confess.

  This condition of affairs were brutal enough and horrible enough if it were true that lynchings occurred only because of the commission of crimes against women—as is constantly declared by ministers, editors, lawyers, teachers, statesmen, and even by women themselves. It has been to the interest of those who did the lynching to blacken the good name of the helpless and defenseless victims of their hate. For this reason they publish at every possible opportunity this excuse for lynching, hoping thereby not only to palliate their own crime but at the same time to prove the negro a moral monster and unworthy of the respect and sympathy of the civilized world. But this alleged reason adds to the deliberate injustice of the mob’s work. Instead of lynchings being caused by assaults upon women, the statistics show that not one-third of the victims of lynchings are even charged with such crimes. The Chicago Tribune, which publishes annually lynching statistics, is authority for the following:

  In 1892, when lynching reached high-water mark, there were 241 persons lynched. Of this number, 160 were of negro descent. Four of them were lynched in New York, Ohio, and Kansas; the remainder were murdered in the South. Five of this number were females. The charges for which they were lynched cover a wide range. They are as follows:

  RAPE 46

  MURDER 58

  RIOTING 3

  RACE PREJUDICE 6

  NO CAUSE GIVEN 4

  INCENDIARISM 6

  ROBBERY 6

  ASSAULT & BATTERY I

  No OFFENSE STATED, BOY AND GIRL 2

  ATTEMPTED RAPE II

  SUSPECTED ROBBERY 4

  LARCENY I

  SELF-DEFENSE I

  INSULTING WOMEN 2

  DESPERADOES 6

  FRAUD I

  ATTEMPTED MURDER 2

  In the case of the boy and girl above referred to, their father, named Hastings, was accused of the murder of a white man. His fourteen-year-old daughter and sixteen-year-old son were hanged and their bodies filled with bullets; then the father was also lynched. This occurred in November, 1892, at Jonesville, La.

  Indeed, the record for the last twenty years shows exactly the same or a smaller proportion who have been charged with this horrible crime. Quite a number of the one-third alleged cases of assault that have been personally investigated by the writer have shown that there was no foundation in fact for the charges; yet the claim is not made that there were no real culprits among them. The negro has been too long associated with the white man not to have copied his vices as well as his virtues. But the negro resents and utterly repudiates the efforts to blacken his good name by asserting that assaults upon women are peculiar to his race. The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes. Very scant notice is taken of the matter when this is the condition of affairs. What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

  But since the world has accepted this false and unjust statement; and the burden of proof has been placed upon the negro to vindicate his race. he is taking steps to do so. The Anti-Lynching Bureau of the National Afro-American Council is arranging to have every lynching investigated and publish the facts to the world, as has been done in the case of Sam Hose, who was burned alive last April at Newman, Ga. The detective’s report showed that Hose killed Cranford, his employer, in self-defense, and that, while a mob was organizing to hunt Hose to punish him for killing a white man, not till twenty-four hours after the murder was the charge of rape, embellished with psychological and physical impossibilities, circulated. That gave an impetus to the hunt, and the Atlanta Constitution’s reward of $500 keyed the mob to the necessary burning and roasting pitch. Of five hundred newspaper clippings of that horrible affair, nine-tenths of them assumed Hose’s guilt—simply because his murderers said so, and because it is the fashion to believe the negro peculiarly addicted to this species of crime. All the negro asks is justice—a fair and impartial trial in the courts of the country. That given, he will abide the result.

  But this question affects the entire American nation, and from several points of view: First, on the ground of consistency. Our watchword has been “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. Neither do brave men or women stand by and see such things done without compunction of conscience, nor read of them without protest. Our nation has been active and outspoken in its endeavors to right the wrongs of the Armenian Christian, the Russian Jew, and the Irish Home Ruler, the native women of India, the Siberian exile, and the Cuban patriot. Surely it should be the nation’s duty to correct its own evils!

  Second, on the ground of economy. To those who fail to be convinced from any other point of view touching this momentous question, a consideration of the economic phase might not be amiss. It is generally known that mobs in Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, and other States have lynched subjects of other countries. When their different governments demanded satisfaction, our country was forced to confess her inability to protect said subjects in the several States because of our State-rights doctrines, or in turn demand punishment of the lynchers. This confession, while humiliating in the extreme, was not satisfactory; and, while the United States cannot protect, she can pay. This she has done, and it is certain will have to do again in the case of the recent lynching of Italians in Louisiana. The United States already has paid in indemnities for lynching nearly a half million dollars.

  Third, for the honor of Anglo-Saxon civilization. No scoffer at our boasted American civilization could say anything more harsh of it than does the American white man himself who says he is unable to protect the honor of his women without resort to such brutal, inhuman, and degrading exhibitions as characterize “lynching bees.” No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.

  Finally, for love of country. No American travels abroad without blushing for shame for his country on this subject. And whatever the excuse that passes current in the United States, it avails nothing abroad. With all the powers of government in control; with all laws made by white men, administered by white judges, jurors, prosecuting attorneys, and sheriffs; with every office of the executive department filled by white men—no e
xcuse can be offered for exchanging the orderly administration of justice for barbarous lynchings and “unwritten laws.” Our country should be placed speedily above the plane of confessing herself a failure at self government. This cannot be until Americans of every section, of broadest patriotism and best and wisest citizenship, not only see the defect in our country’s armor but take the necessary steps to remedy it. Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter. Indeed, the silence and seeming condonation grow more marked as the years go by.

  A few months ago the conscience of this country was shocked because, after a two-weeks trial, a French judicial tribunal pronounced Captain Dreyfus guilty. And yet, in our own land under our own flag, the writer can give day and detail of one thousand men, women, and children who during the last six years were put to death without trial before any tribunal on earth. Humiliating indeed, but altogether unanswerable, was the reply of the French press to our protest: “Stop your lynchings at home before you send your protests abroad.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Triumph and Tribulation: Defining Black Womanhood, 1920-1957

  ... who is more deserving of admiration than the black woman, she who has borne the rigors of slavery, the deprivations consequent on a pauperized race, and the indignities heaped upon a weak and defenseless people. Yet she has suffered all with fortitude, and stands ever ready to help in the onward march to freedom and power. Be not discouraged black women of the world, but push forward, regardless of the lack of appreciation shown you. A race must be saved, a country must be redeemed....

  -AMY JACQUES GARVEY, Negro World

  INTRODUCTION

  The period between 1920 and 1960 has frequently been interpreted as the “nadir” of feminist activity. With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, which granted women the right to vote, and the decline of major women’s organizations, scholars argue that the feminist movement went into hibernation. Among African American women there is a different narrative. The New Negro Movement, to use Alain Locke’s terminology, or the Harlem Renaissance (1917—1935), was characterized by an unprecedented outpouring of black women’s creative energies. Zora Neale Hurston’s feminist classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) underscored the importance of black women’s finding their own voices and liberating themselves from narrow conceptions of womanhood. A host of other women writers—Jessie Faucet, Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Dorothy West, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson—joined the chorus and made visible the triumphs and tribulations of black women.

  Elise Johnson McDougald captured the dualities of the black female experience in 1925—it seemed to have been both the best and worst of times. Professional women lived better lives while the masses of working women struggled to earn a decent living. While World War I had lured thousands of black women away from the kitchens of the South into better jobs in the industrial North, they were still relegated to the most menial, lowest-paying jobs. After the war ended in 1918, unemployment plagued them.

  Black women’s activism centered around passing a federal anti-lynching bill, unionizing themselves as workers, achieving economic independence, securing birth control, enhancing their educational status, and improving the working condition of domestics. Club women were also concerned about the global plight of women of color and infusing black history into school curricula. Educated women were aware of organized struggles for women’s liberation worldwide after World War II and the reawakening of feminism as a rally cry. The publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), in which she attempted to define the nature of womanhood, would energize feminists for generations. Her argument that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” through cultural conditioning impacted at least one African American feminist, Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote a long analysis which appears here in print for the first time.

  The civil rights activism of women in the 1950s such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Jo Ann Robinson, Modjeska Simkins, and Daisy Bates generated a climate of discontent which anticipated the full-blown and transformative black liberation struggle of the 1960s, out of which emerged the “second-wave” women’s movement.

  Elise Johnson McDougald

  Elise Johnson McDougald, journalist and teacher, wrote about the diverse lives of black women during the Harlem Renaissance in “The Double Task: The Struggle of Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,” which appeared in Survey Graphic, Alain Locke’s magazine, in 1925. Her delineation of four distinct categories of women reveals her sensitivity to class and to the oppression that plagues certain groups. This is also the first essay that names the double burden of racism and sexism that African American women face in the United States, though she indicates that they are more concerned with racial equality. She also discusses sexism within certain black families, and efforts on the part of black women in organizations to achieve racial empowerment despite the many obstacles they face.

  THE STRUGGLE OF NEGRO WOMEN FOR SEX AND RACE EMANCIPATION

  Throughout the long years of history, woman has been the weathervane, the indicator, showing in which direction the wind of destiny blows. Her status and development have augured now calm and stability, now swift currents of progress. What then is to be said of the Negro woman today?

  In Harlem, more than anywhere else, the Negro woman is free from the cruder handicaps of primitive household hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race subjugation. Here she has considerable opportunity to measure her powers in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city. Here the questions naturally arise: “What are her problems?” and “How is she solving them?”

  To answer these questions, one must have in mind not any one Negro woman, but rather a colorful pageant of individuals, each differently endowed. Like the red and yellow of the tiger-lily, the skin of one is brilliant against the star-lit darkness of a racial sister. From grace to strength, they vary in infinite degree, with traces of the race’s history left in physical and mental outline on each. With a discerning mind, one catches the multiform charm, beauty, and character of Negro women; and grasps the fact that their problem cannot be thought of in mass.

  Because only a few have caught this vision, the attitude of mind of most New Yorkers causes the Negro woman serious difficulty. She is conscious that what is left of chivalry is not directed toward her. She realizes that the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, exclude her almost entirely. Instead, the grotesque Aunt Jemimas of the street-car advertisements proclaim only an ability to serve, without grace or loveliness. Nor does the drama catch her finest spirit. She is most often used to provoke the mirthless laugh of ridicule; or to portray feminine viciousness or vulgarity not peculiar to Negroes. This is the shadow over her. To a race naturally sunny comes the twilight of self-doubt and a sense of personal inferiority. It cannot be denied that these are potent and detrimental influences, though not generally recognized because they are in the realm of the mental and spiritual. More apparent are the economic handicaps which follow her recent entrance into industry. It is conceded that she has special difficulties because of the poor working conditions and low wages of her men. It is not surprising that only the determined women forge ahead to results other than mere survival. The few who do prove their mettle stimulate one to a closer study of how this achievement is won in Harlem.

  Better to visualize the Negro woman at her job, our vision of a host of individuals must once more resolve itself into groups on the basis of activity. First, comes a very small leisure group—the wives and daughters of men who are in business, in the professions and a few well-paid personal service occupations. Second, a most active and progressive group, the women in business and the professions. Third, the many women in the trades and industry. Fourth, a group weighty in num
bers struggling on in domestic service, with an even less fortunate fringe of casual workers, fluctuating with the economic temper of the times.

  Negro women are of a race which is free neither economically, socially, nor spiritually. Like women in general, but more particularly like those of other oppressed minorities, the Negro woman has been forced to submit to over-powering conditions. Pressure has been exerted upon her, both from without and within her group. Her emotional and sex life is a reflex of her economic station. The women of the working class will react, emotionally and sexually, similarly to the working-class women of other races. The Negro woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned chiefly to qualities of race, any more than a white woman does. Yet she has been singled out and advertised as having lower sex standards. Superficial critics who have had contact only with the lower grades of Negro women, claim that they are more immoral than other groups of women. This I deny. This is the sort of criticism which predicates of one race, to its detriment, that which is common to all races. Sex irregularities are not a matter of race, but of socio-economic conditions. Research shows that most of the African tribes from which the Negro sprang have strict codes for sex relations. There is no proof of inherent weakness in the ethnic group.