To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  But as the twenty-first century opens, Ida B. Wells is well on the road to achieving all the honors and recognition never accorded her in her lifetime. Even as Wells’s star dimmed after her death, her youngest daughter, Alfreda Duster, preserved her mother’s papers, edited her autobiography, and worked tirelessly to secure its publication. She finally succeeded in publishing Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells in 1970, at a time when black history and women’s history were finally beginning to receive widespread attention. Since then, Wells has been studied by an ever increasing number of scholars and biographers, whose work appreciates the importance of her antilynching campaign and pioneering history as a female leader. Far from forgotten, Wells now receives a full measure of the public recognition that eluded her during the second half of her life. Studied and taught in school and college curriculums, she was even featured on a U.S. postage stamp issued in 1990. And in 2005, her work was lauded on the floor of Congress. The Senate adopted a “nonbinding” resolution “apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact antilynching legislation” (which did not receive a unanimous vote). Too little, too late, Wells might have thought with reference to the Senate resolution. But she might also take comfort in the fact that today her life and work are not just honored but also studied and taught, ensuring that her “crusade for justice” will have a continuing impact on future generations.

  Wells is now appreciated as an important historical figure not in the least because her life and work illuminate dilemmas that still vex us today. Racism and sexism still shape American politics in myriad ways, coloring popular perceptions of both black and female leaders and perpetuating the challenges to black female leadership that Wells faced. Moreover, Wells’s life provides invaluable historical testimony on the often contradictory impact of being black and female at the turn of the nineteenth century—a time when the lives of most black women went unrecorded. Among the relatively few African American women of her era to leave a life chronicled well enough to be studied or remembered in any detail, Ida documented experiences that would otherwise be lost to history. A journalist and an activist, she left behind many news articles, editorials, petitions, and protest pamphlets. She was also a prolific correspondent and compulsive writer who recorded the details of her life in diaries, letters, and a long autobiography. Many of her diaries and much of her personal correspondence are long gone—burned in a house fire that destroyed many of her papers. But, carefully preserved by Alfreda Duster, Wells’s autobiography and her surviving diaries and papers combine to provide a rich documentary record of the life of a woman whose observations about her world remain insightful even today.

  Not the least bit representative of mainstream modes of thinking common to her day—among whites or within her own community—Wells was an extraordinary individual. Her biography offers far more than a useful chronicle of her times or a life characteristic of her era. An unrelenting and insightful social critic, Wells spent her life testifying to the social, political, and economic evils of her era and thereby recording the toll they took on a generation of African Americans who, by and large, lacked the education, opportunity, and political freedom to speak for themselves. An indignant witness to the violence, segregation, and other forms of racial discrimination white Southerners used to restore white supremacy, her life preserves a history of black activism and female leadership that historians are just now beginning to recover. Moreover, her commitment to “‘do something’ about every item of injustice and discrimination…whatever the matter happened to be” makes her a hero whose life still stands as both a lesson and a challenge to modern-day Americans—black or white, male or female. Always impatient with anyone unwilling to speak out against injustice, Wells reflected on the ongoing challenge faced by those who shared her commitment to equality and civil rights. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” was the motto she used to begin the final chapter of an autobiography too often interrupted by her protest activities to be completed.10

  1

  Coming of Age in Mississippi

  WE ARE ALL SHAPED BY OUR CHILDHOODS, BUT IDA B. WELLS’S childhood was more formative than most. The time, place, and circumstances of her birth structured her life in decisive ways, as did the early death of both her parents when she was just sixteen years old. To be black and born a slave in the American South in 1862, as Wells was, was to enter the world in the middle of a revolution brought on by a cataclysmic civil war and its aftermath. A member of the first post-emancipation generation of African American Southerners, Wells grew up during a unique moment in American history. Contrary to our often romantic notions of African American emancipation, slavery did not just go out in a blaze of glory with the Union Army’s hard-fought victory. Instead, the Civil War was followed by an almost equally bitter struggle between the South and the North over the fate of the freed people, in which the ex-slaves allied with their Northern emancipators in a desperate struggle to secure their rights as American citizens. Known as Radical Reconstruction, this period spanned the years 1866 to 1877, and saw Northern Republican leaders impose black voting rights on a defiant white South, while the ex-slaves educated themselves, participated in politics, and tried to create a free and equal world for themselves and their children.

  Reconstruction did not last long or fulfill the freed people’s hopes. Instead, it ended in 1877, after a series of state-by-state defeats that marked the power and persistence of white Southern resistance to black empowerment as well as the fleeting nature of Northern concern for the freed people’s well-being. But for all its brevity, Reconstruction loomed large in Wells’s life. The revolutionary hopes, dreams, and dangers of Reconstruction shaped her childhood, which ended in 1878 with the death of her parents. Raised by ex-slaves who were fiercely committed to the brave new world that newly freed blacks sought to create during Reconstruction, Wells lost both her parents and the prospect of that brave new world at the same time.

  Its memory shaped her life, perhaps because these combined losses were so devastating. Indeed, a half century later, when Wells sat down to write her autobiography, Reconstruction loomed largest in her mind. In her preface she explained that she was committing to paper her life story for young people “who have so little of our race’s history.” And then, quite strikingly for someone who lived most of her life after Reconstruction, Wells went on to stress that she felt especially “constrained” to write “because there is such a lack of authentic race history of the Reconstruction times written by the Negro himself.” Seemingly writing an introduction to her parents’ biography rather than her own, Wells continued, “We have Frederick Douglass’s history of slavery as he knew and experienced it. But of the time of storm and stress immediately after the Civil War, of the Ku Klux Klan, of ballot box stuffing, of wholesale murders of Negroes who tried to exercise their new-found rights about which the white South has published so much that is false, the Negroes’ political life of the era—our race had little that is definite or authentic.”1

  In Wells’s own lifetime, the memory of what W.E.B. Du Bois would call “Black Reconstruction” was distorted by white Americans from both regions. The myth of Reconstruction that emerged after the North and South reconciled in the late nineteenth century cast Reconstruction as a scandalously corrupt period of “Negro rule,” in which unscrupulous “carpetbaggers” from the North collaborated with self-serving Southern “scalawags” to turn the government of the South over to ludicrously inept freedmen. This national fable allowed white Northerners to turn a blind eye to the disenfranchisement of blacks in the post-Reconstruction South and assume no responsibility for abandoning the protection of freed people’s rights during Reconstruction. Embraced by American popular culture as well as American political leaders, it helped whites in both regions justify the entrenched racial inequities and pervasive racist violence that persisted into twentieth-century America. As commemorated in popular works such as D. W
. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915), Reconstruction was a disaster remedied only by the forcible restoration of the “white man’s government” that came afterward. An ode to the Ku Klux Klan, the film featured white actors in blackface who depicted African American men as lust-crazed savages.

  Lost in all the convenient mythologizing was the black experience, or as Wells writes, “the gallant fight and marvelous bravery of the black men of the South fighting and dying to exercise and maintain their newborn rights as free men and citizens, with little protection from the government that gave them those rights and with no previous training in citizenship or politics.” Personally galling for Wells was the absence of any record of the courage and convictions of her parents and the political and cultural dramas of her own childhood, all of which had combined to give Wells an enduring faith in the power of black people to educate themselves and govern their own destiny. These beliefs shaped her life and also helped form her conviction that the story of Reconstruction would fire the “race pride” of America’s black youth, if only “it had been written down.”2

  A Child of Freedom

  The sweeping social and political changes that structured her life started early. Ida Bell Wells came into the world in the town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, just as Union troops began to sweep through northern Mississippi in preparation for General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign. Her birth on July 16, 1862, must have been a source of both joy and anxiety to her parents. James and Elisabeth Wells greeted their firstborn in a prosperous Mississippi town where the outcome of the war was far from certain. The site of both a Rebel armory and a Union supply depot, Holly Springs was continually under siege by either Union or Confederate forces. Contested territory, it changed hands more than fifty times over the course of the war. The wartime violence and uncertainty was devastating to all concerned, and weighed especially heavily on slave families such as the Wellses. Terrorized by Confederate raids that sent “Negroes and abolitionists begging for mercy,” Holly Springs’s African American residents saw their hopes for freedom dashed so often before the Confederate forces finally surrendered the town on May 4, 1864, that even then many must have wondered whether freedom had come to stay.3 By Ida’s third birthday, however, the war was over and the slaves were free.

  Holly Springs in January 1863—less than a year after Ida B. Wells was born. This wartime sketch shows the town in the wake of a Confederate raid that destroyed its railroad station and several blocks of buildings.

  Emancipation was the long-awaited day of jubilee across the slave South, which the ex-slaves greeted with celebrations, thankful prayers, and countless efforts to take immediate advantage of their liberty. Wells’s parents were not among those many ex-slaves who took their freedom on the road in search of lost relatives or greater liberties—although they did, in a solemn ceremony, exercise these liberties by legalizing their slave marriage. A proud and independent man even as a slave, Wells’s father, known as Jim, was an apprentice to a contractor and builder, Mr. Bolling. Jim’s wife, Elisabeth (“Lizzie”), served as Bolling’s cook. After the war, the Wellses initially chose to stay on with Mr. Bolling. But they did not remain in Bolling’s household long. Unlike many ex-slaves, Lizzie and Jim Wells prospered during Reconstruction, rapidly achieving a political and economic independence that was all too rare among African Americans in the post-emancipation South. In doing so, they sought independence for their children as well, preparing them for freedom in a household that abhorred slavery, honored education, and achieved self-sufficiency.

  As skilled urban laborers, the Wellses escaped the poverty that was among the most acute problems faced by black Southerners after the war. The vast majority of the freed people were agricultural laborers who came out of slavery with “nothing but freedom.”4 Landless, unskilled, and uneducated, most black Southerners had to depend on bitter and vanquished white Southerners for their livelihood during the hard economic times that followed the war. All across the Southern countryside, Reconstruction was shaped by the often futile struggles of freed people to receive fair wages for agricultural work from impoverished Southern planters who were both unwilling and unable to pay them a living wage. With the collapse of the Confederacy, white Southerners lost their capital in both Confederate currency and slaves. With defeat their currency lost all value, and emancipation wiped out their investment in slaves—who prior to the Civil War had been the most valuable form of private property other than land in the United States. Stripped of their most valuable investments, former slaveholders still remained among their region’s largest landowners. But they owned virtually nothing other than their land, and therefore rarely had enough cash to pay for wage labor. Sharecropping was the compromise ultimately reached between the land-rich and the landless. Blacks ended up tending plots of land in return for a share of the crop produced. Sharecropping, while offering black families a little more independence than slavery, was almost equally exploitative. Dependent on the planters to advance them food, clothing, and other necessities from the plantation store, and subject to interest rates often exceeding 50 percent, many sharecroppers ended up in debt even after they had received their share of the crop. Sharecropping was a “state of servitude but little better than slavery,” one freedman complained. Freed “without any chance to live to ourselves…we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food and clothing.”5

  By contrast, Reconstruction dawned much brighter for the Wells family. Ida’s parents, as she remembered, were never poor because they were “able,” a word that reflected her pride in her parents’ skill and independence. Ironically, Jim Wells owed his independence, at least in part, to his slave owner father. The only son of a slaveholder who had no children with his wife, Jim Wells received some recognition and privileges from his powerful parent. He grew up on his father’s plantation in Tippah County, Mississippi, where his workload was relatively light. According to Ida, he served primarily as “the companion and comfort” of his slaveholding parent’s old age.6 Moreover, his father provided him with what would prove to be a valuable education, sending him to Holly Springs to learn the carpenter’s trade when he reached eighteen, which is how he began his apprenticeship with Bolling. According to Ida, her grandfather expected his enslaved son to use his skills on the plantation once his training was complete. But once apprenticed, Jim Wells never returned. Following the war’s conclusion, he remained with Bolling only until election time, when Bolling instructed him to vote for the Democrats. Wells refused, choosing instead to vote for the party that had brought Radical Reconstruction and black voting to the South, the Republicans. When he returned from the polls, he found himself locked out of Bolling’s shop. Wells promptly set out on his own, purchasing his own tools and renting a house for himself and his family.

  Thereafter, Jim Wells was able to support himself and his family as a carpenter. Although he owed his preparation for independence at least partially to the education provided by his slave owner father, there is little evidence that Jim felt any filial ties to the man who fathered him. Indeed, both of Ida’s parents expressed only negative memories of their slave days. Ida’s strongest impression of her father’s childhood revolved around the bitter household relations that existed on the plantation where he grew up, evidence of which she recorded in her autobiography.

  Like her son, Jim’s mother, Peggy, and her husband, a man whom she married after emancipation, achieved economic independence once free. Buying a farm in rural Mississippi, the couple raised corn, cotton, and hogs, which they sold at harvest in Holly Springs, where they also visited with the Wells family. During one of these fall visits, Ida’s grandmother brought pork from her farm and news from the old plantation. Their former mistress, “Miss Polly,” wanted Jim Wells to “come and bring the children. She wants to see them.” The irony of a former slave mistress’s request to meet her husband’s slave grandchildren may have been lost on the young Ida, but not the bitterness of her father’s reply: “I neve
r want to see that old woman as long as I live.” Still haunted by his father’s wife’s cruelty toward his mother, Jim told Peggy, “I’ll never forget how she had you stripped and whipped the day after the old man died…I guess it is all right for you to take care of her and forgive her for what she did to you, but she could have starved to death if I’d had my say-so.” The exchange made a lasting impression on Ida, who later reflected that while she did not understand what her father said at the time, she never forgot his words: “Since I have grown old enough to understand I cannot but help feel what an insight into slavery they give.”7

  If the tangled family relations in which Jim Wells grew up were scarcely benign, Ida’s mother’s slave experience was still more painful. Born Elisabeth Warrenton, Ida’s mother met her husband in Mr. Bolling’s household, where she served as cook. Eighteen years old when Ida was born, Lizzie Wells was one of ten children born to a Virginia slave couple. What we do know about her early life speaks to the power of the domestic slave trade to wreak havoc on the lives of individual African Americans. Lizzie Wells suffered the double misfortune of not only being born a slave but also serving in antebellum Virginia, an upper South state with a surplus of slaves. Virginia planters participated in a lively domestic slave trade, selling off unneeded slaves to the rapidly expanding cotton states of the Southwest. Sold to a slave trader at the age of seven, together with two of her sisters, Lizzie was among the hundreds of thousands of surplus slaves carried from the upper South to the Southwest during the antebellum era. Young Elisabeth changed hands several times before she ended up at Mr. Bolling’s. Her early hardships were literally written on her back, which bore scars from the beatings of “overseers and mean masters.”8