by Mia Bay
2
Walking in Memphis
MEMPHIS PROVED TO BE THE MAKING OF IDA B. WELLS. OR, AT the very least, Memphis was where Wells remade herself from a country schoolmistress to an elegant and accomplished young member of the New South’s urban black elite. The transformation was not easy, and it did not happen overnight. Instead, Wells’s transition to city life was gradual. She moved to Memphis in 1881, but a couple of years passed before she was able to complete the city’s schoolteachers’ exam and find a job there. In the meantime, she continued teaching rural schoolchildren, taking a job ten miles outside of the city in Woodstock, Tennessee. Still boarding in the country during the week, Wells first got to know Memphis on the weekends, easing into a new life in a city that was very different from her rural hometown.
A bustling city of 35,000, Memphis was approximately ten times the size of Holly Springs and growing by the day. At the crossroads of several major Southern railroads, it was a commercial hub for the South’s cotton belt and lumber trade. A prosperous and rapidly modernizing city, during the 1880s Memphis was among the first Southern cities to introduce such newfangled conveniences as electric streetcars. More important to Ida was the fact that the Tennessee city housed a much more vibrant and diverse black community than her small Mississippi hometown. Memphis’s population was over 40 percent African American during Ida’s years there. Free to migrate for the first time, during the decades following the Civil War rural black Southerners flocked to urban areas in search of education, autonomy, and work that paid better than sharecropping, and Memphis, in particular, was “a mecca for African-Americans in the region.” Among its attractions was the still-famous Beale Street. Now known as the birthplace of the blues, in Ida’s day the street had a seedier reputation. It was known as the “black magic district.”1 A mile-long strip jammed with gamblers, prostitutes, voodoo doctors, and saloons, Beale Street housed a new black urban underclass that had emerged with emancipation. But farther down Beale Street was another class of black people—the respectable middle-class kind. The office buildings on the first three blocks of Beale Street were occupied by black professionals and businessmen, such as Robert R. Church, a wealthy real estate mogul who, like Ida, had started out in Holly Springs. Also on one of Beale Street’s respectable blocks stood the Beale Street Baptist Church, one of the dominant cultural institutions of black Memphis.
Although by no means well-to-do herself, especially when she first arrived, Ida identified from the start with Memphis’s black elite, and spent her years there carving out a place for herself among the leading black citizens of Memphis. As a rural Southerner and a child of former slaves, Ida’s claim to middle-class status when she first arrived in Memphis was fragile at best. She had only a modest education, her parents were dead, and she was perennially strapped for cash. By and large, her financial troubles were the inevitable and unavoidable result of her familial obligations. In addition to taking care of her youngest siblings, Lily and Annie, during her early years in Memphis, Ida also sent money to her two brothers and supported her disabled sister Eugenia. Moreover, Ida’s finances remained precarious even after her aunt Fannie moved to Visalia, California, in April 1886, taking Lily and Annie with her. Relieved of caring for the two girls, Ida still had to contribute to their support and struggled to find the ten dollars a month she sent to Fannie on their behalf. Once her aunt left she also had to find her own accommodations, which meant paying from ten to fifteen dollars a month to board with a variety of landladies, who changed over time in part because Wells had trouble keeping up with her monthly obligations.
A diary kept by Wells during her years in Memphis, containing entries running from 1885 to 1887, dramatizes both her precarious finances and her middle-class aspirations. One of her few surviving personal documents, it shows her moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse in a vain attempt to find suitable long-term housing. One of Ida’s landladies moved away; another mistreated her children; one woman had to give up her home when she could not make ends meet; and Ida’s attempt to live with her friends the Settles, a wealthy Memphis couple, foundered when she believed that they had overcharged her. “Sick & tired [of] begging people to take me to board,” Ida dreamed of going “into housekeeping by my own hook.” But her hopes of getting a loan to purchase her aunt Fannie’s Memphis house never came to fruition. Far from being in a position to buy a home, during most of her time in Memphis Wells was constantly in debt. “Mr. F[roman] was up last evening & loaned me the $3 I asked,” she wrote on December 3, 1885, in a typical diary entry. “M[enken] sent a bill of $78 and I have no money to pay it. Looking back at my debts I am thankful I could not accomplish my purpose and borrow money to get away—I would have been more deeply in debt.”2
In the diary, Wells kept an ongoing record of her expenditures and debts, which reveals how tenuous her claim to an elegant middle-class life was. She had grown up to be a very pretty young woman who enjoyed dressing well. But she rued the money she spent on clothes and expressed reservations about almost every purchase. “I am very sorry I did not resist the impulse to buy that cloak” she concluded one discussion of her finances. “I would have been $15 richer.” Elsewhere she worried about the expense of a new outfit: “Wore my new dress & hat as they were finished up and like the dress very much. Paid the woman $7.60 for making it and altogether it cost a good deal.” Wells clearly regarded her clothing expenditures as a self-indulgence that she could neither afford nor avoid. “I have bought enough silk to finish my dress with, and buttons, thread, linings etc. Amounting to $15.80 & yet have no parasol, or other things I would like to have,” she fretted in another diary entry. “My expenses are transcending my income; I must stop.”3 Yet her unfulfilled longing for a parasol and her reference to sewing her own dress in an age when many middle-class women left such work to dressmakers suggest that no amount of self-discipline could have curbed her aspirations.
Instead, what we see during Wells’s early years in Memphis is a determined young woman cobbling together a middle-class life on a teacher’s salary that was perennially stretched to support too many people, resulting in repeated emergency recourse to credit and loans. Despite her modest means, Wells had access to Memphis’s black elite by virtue of her late father’s many friendships and good reputation in Holly Springs. Among the many friends and possibly Masonic brothers of Jim Wells were men who later left Holly Springs to become prominent Memphis businessmen and professionals. They included the black millionaire Robert R. Church and the businessman Alfred Froman, as well as attorney Benjamin F. Booth and teacher Green P. Hamilton. Although Ida initially knew Church only by reputation, she knew at least some of the other men well. She regarded Froman, especially, as a mentor and second father, referring to him as “Dad” and “Pap” in her diary.4 Solicitous of her interests, he likely played a crucial role in helping Wells get settled in Memphis. Appointed to the Memphis School Board in 1883, Froman may have used his influence to help Wells secure her teaching position the following year. At the very least, she relied on Froman for counsel and much-needed loans, and would later develop a similar relationship with Church.
Still, Wells’s success at gaining access, no matter how tenuous, to nineteenth-century America’s black elite should not be attributed to family connections. Family ties, no doubt, helped Wells survive her early years in Memphis, but they cannot explain her remarkable social and professional achievements there. When Wells arrived in Memphis she was a small-town nineteen-year-old whose unfinished education qualified her only to teach in rural schools; in less than five years she transformed herself into city schoolteacher and published writer. Within ten, she became the best-known black woman journalist in America, earning the nickname “Iola, Princess of the Press.” And all the while, Wells helped support her siblings and enjoyed an active social life. Attractive, outgoing, and interested in men, Wells embraced the opportunities Memphis offered young women of her era, entertaining suitors and looking for love even as she developed a
career that would make marriage less of a necessity for her than it was for many young women of her generation.
Wells’s remarkable accomplishments in Memphis attest to her extraordinary energy and sense of purpose. The personal and financial obligations that raising her siblings imposed on her, along with the limitations of her education, should have kept her teaching in rural schools for the rest of her life. And, if the educational aspirations Ida inherited from her parents helped her avoid that fate, neither her parents nor anyone she knew steered her toward her career as a successful writer. In the 1880s, when Wells first rose to fame, there were only forty-five black female journalists in America, many of whom lived and worked outside the South. In joining the nation’s first generation of black female journalists, Wells forged a path largely unfamiliar to her ex-slave parents and their contemporaries. But her career certainly honored the occupational ambitions of her parents, which were high for both themselves and their children. And by all evidence she also took her political sensibility from Jim and Lizzie Wells, whose fierce commitment to Radical Reconstruction had been evident to Ida even as a child.
By the 1880s, however, Ida lived in a different world from the one her parents had known. Black men still voted in Memphis, but largely due to a stalemate in municipal politics that left the black vote uncontested. In the wake of Reconstruction, the political possibilities available to blacks were under attack in both Tennessee and the rest of the South. Southern Democrats had reclaimed state governments with a vengeance, and moved quickly to bar blacks from regaining political power. Starting in the 1880s, Democratic state governments began to exclude black voters from the political process altogether through the passage of prohibitive poll taxes, literacy tests, and other legal exclusions such as the grandfather clause, which barred most African Americans from voting by limiting the franchise to men whose grandfathers had voted. But, despite the political climate, Wells was not ready to abandon the Reconstruction-era ideals of racial equality and black political participation. Indeed, more than anything, it was her political commitments that combined with her energy and determination to launch her extraordinary career.
“Like a Lady”: Wells’s Railroad Lawsuits
As a writer and activist, Wells’s primary preoccupations would be political, so it is only fitting that her career first took shape around a one-woman political battle she launched in 1883 at age twenty. That year, she became embroiled in two civil rights suits against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad, which repeatedly refused to seat her in its first-class car. Wells’s first published article chronicled her legal battle with the railroad, and her subsequent writings were as political as her editors—who usually expected women journalists to write about domestic subjects—allowed them to be. In the long run her passion for politics and journalism would also end up helping her make ends meet. She began her writing career penning free articles for black newspapers and church publications. In 1889, when she finally bought her first property, it was not a house but a one-third interest in a newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. A local black newspaper, Free Speech was the property of two African American men, who signed Wells on as both part owner and full-time editor of their fledgling publication. Ida B. Wells’s position at Free Speech marks the utter singularity of her career. When she bought an interest in and assumed editorship of the paper, she became the first woman owner and editor of a black newspaper in American history.
Wells’s road to journalism began with nothing more complicated than a trip to work. In 1883, two years after her move to Memphis, Ida was still teaching in Woodstock and traveling home on the weekends. In some respects, her life must have seemed largely unchanged from what it had been in Mississippi, where she also had a grueling commute. But gone at least was the indignity of the contrary old mule she had ridden to work during her years teaching outside Holly Springs. Years later, Wells still remembered her battles with Ginger—an “antiquated [and] slow-moving” creature who always refused to go “even a mite faster no matter how many ‘Giddaps’ were yelled.”5 No mule was needed in Memphis, which had a rail line that took her directly to Woodstock. Indeed, Wells traveled in style, riding first class on the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad. But traveling by rail ultimately posed more serious problems than Ginger ever had.
Railroad travel did not become commonplace in the South until the 1870s and 1880s, when the railroad companies began to expand and consolidate their lines to offer regular passenger service across much of the region. A far more public mode of travel than horse-drawn carriages, railroad cars posed a serious challenge to “respectable” women of the Victorian era, whose delicate sensibilities were thought to flourish only in the home. Indeed, the moral dangers of train trips were routinely addressed in etiquette manuals. Women traveling unattended ran the risk of being compromised by overly familiar male passengers, and were advised to avoid speaking to male strangers and make sure to “find a seat next to another lady, or near an elderly gentleman.”6 Railroad companies addressed such concerns by providing a special “ladies’ car” for first-class passengers, which offered shelter to unaccompanied traveling women such as Ida B. Wells, who seated herself in the ladies’ car as she rode back and forth from school.
Wells no doubt chose to travel first class on her journeys for several reasons. Not only did her choice of the ladies’ car mark the young teacher as a respectable member of Memphis’s black middle class, but a first-class ticket offered her a quieter and far more comfortable journey. Usually known as “smokers,” the second-class cars provided nothing beyond hard wooden seats and accommodated any number of male tobacco smokers drawn from all classes. Moreover, on nineteenth-century passenger trains, which typically consisted of a locomotive and two passenger cars, the smoker was typically the forward car. In addition to tobacco smoke, its passengers were exposed to the heat, soot, and noise from the engine. By contrast, the ladies’ car rode at the end of the train. Typically more plush and comfortable than the smokers, ladies’ cars featured upholstered seats and sometimes even sofas, along with ice water dispensers and two water closets. Designed to shield women from having to share a bathroom or other facilities with unfamiliar male travelers, the ladies’ cars were reserved for women and their male traveling companions, a distinction which at least theoretically made them open to any black woman able to pay the price of a first-class ticket.
Diagram of a ladies’ car
By the 1880s, however, the color line had become the preeminent social divide in the South, and gender distinctions on the railroad were giving way to distinctions of race. Black women were increasingly unwelcome in the ladies’ car, as Wells found out one Saturday in 1883. Wells was returning to Memphis after a week in Holly Springs when her journey came to an abrupt end. Having bought a first-class ticket, she boarded the train and seated herself in “the ladies coach as usual.” For two years she had ridden the rails between Woodstock and Memphis without incident. But when the conductor came by that day, he told her he could not take her ticket in the ladies’ car. Initially, their exchange was polite, Wells would later testify: “He said that he would treat me like a lady…but that I must go to the other car.” Wells recalled replying, “If he wished to treat me like a lady, he would leave me alone,” while remaining in her seat. The conductor finished taking tickets from the other passengers and then returned, moving Wells’s bags and umbrella to the forward car in an effort to get her to move there. Wells did not follow, telling him that “the forward car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies’ car, I intended to stay.”7 Losing patience, the conductor then grabbed her arm and tried to drag her out of her seat. Utterly determined to stay, Wells managed to retain her seat by hanging on to her chair and sinking her teeth into the conductor’s hand.
At twenty-one years old, Wells had grown up to become a petite woman. She was a little under five feet tall and had a trim figure, but despite her diminutive size she put up an impressive fight. In the aftermath of
her first round with the conductor, she “braced her feet against the seat in front and was holding on to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again himself.” Still determined to pry her loose from her chair, the conductor sought assistance from the baggage clerk and another man, and only with their help was he finally able to dislodge Wells and drag her out of the first-class car. As the three men carried her out, they were congratulated by “the white ladies and gentlemen in the car.” Indeed, some of the other passengers, Wells recalled in her autobiography, even “stood in the seats so that they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.”8
Wells’s altercation dramatized the day-to-day indignities that African American women could expect to meet when they ventured into public spaces, and especially when traveling by rail. It also underscored the dilemmas they faced in responding to such indignities. Writing in 1892, another black Southerner, Anna Julia Cooper, reflected that black women travelers who sought to defend their dignity were caught in a double bind. Extended few courtesies by white train officials, even when allowed to travel, black women often received no assistance in getting on or off the train or moving their luggage. At stations with no raised platform, “Gentlemanly and efficient” railroad conductors would help the white female passengers off the train and then “deliberately fold their arms and turn away when the black woman’s turn came to alight—bearing her satchel and bearing besides another unnameable burden inside her heaving bosom and compressed lips.” Yet any protest would only make black women look even less ladylike to scornful white audiences, who never saw middle-class white women fight to be treated courteously. “The feeling of slighted womanhood is unlike any other emotion of the soul,” Cooper reflected mournfully. “Its first impulse of wrathful protest and self-vindication is checked and shamed by the consciousness that self-assertion would outrage further that same delicate instinct.”9
