by Mia Bay
By contrast, that year saw racial violence reach a post-Reconstruction high—1892 saw 239 lynchings. And the Memphis murders taught Wells that there was no practical remedy for the racial terror that sustained Jim Crow. Observing earlier lynchings from farther afield, Wells had previously advocated aggressive self-defense. “Wrote a dynamitic article to the G[ate] C[ity] P[ress] almost advising murder,” she noted in her diary on September 4, 1886. The case that had Wells up in arms then was the brutal lynching of a black woman in Tennessee. “A colored woman accused of poisoning a white one was taken from the county jail and stripped naked and hung up in the court house yard and her body riddled with bullets and exposed to view!” Ever the pragmatist, even as Wells expressed her shock and despair, she was thinking about remedies up to and including divine retribution. “Oh my God! Can such be and no justice for it?” No copies of her article exist today, but whatever self-defensive strategy she advised, Wells was left worrying that “it may be unwise to express myself so strongly.”20
An 1891 editorial in Free Speech likely written by Wells helps explain why she might well worry. Likewise “almost advising murder,” it praised blacks in Georgetown, Kentucky, who had set their town on fire in the wake of the lynching of a member of their community. “Not until the Negro rises in his might and takes a hand resenting such cold-blooded murders,” Ida then wrote, “will a halt be called in wholesale lynching.”21 But events in Memphis in 1892 showed that militant self-defense could be both dangerous and futile—and may well have left Wells feeling a little guilty about her previous editorials. If nothing else, the lynching at the Curve demonstrated that African American attempts at self-defense could generate still more violence, setting the stage for battles the black community could not hope to win. Both during and after the conflict at the Curve, black men in Memphis received no protection under the law. Flight was the best, and arguably the only, option when it came to self-defense.
Accordingly, after the spring of 1892, Wells became a fervent supporter of migration. She did not rule out even Africa as a possible destination for “judicious emigration from lynch-infested districts.”22 Wells’s views distinguished her from other leading African Americans of her day, many of whom were adamantly opposed to black migration from the South, irrespective of the destination. The eminent ex-slave leader Frederick Douglass, for example, saw the Kansas migration as “a premature, disheartening surrender” that “would secure freedom and free institutions by migration rather than by protection, by flight rather than by right.”23 But Wells’s belief in black self-protection evaporated in the aftermath of the Memphis lynching. “We are outnumbered and without arms,” she told Free Speech’s readers in an editorial published then. “The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is…only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town that will not protect our lives or our property.”24
As Wells had come to recognize, violence lay at the heart of the politics of white supremacy that had triumphed in the post-Reconstruction South and was increasingly invoked to suppress all forms of black self-assertion—physical, political, or economic. Brute force played a key role in the achievement of the segregation laws and disenfranchisement measures of the 1880s and 1890s. Moreover, mob violence against black Southerners persisted even with erosion of the political and civil rights that African Americans enjoyed during Reconstruction. Crucial to restoring white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South, such violence also helped perpetuate white rule. In particular, lynchings and other forms of racial violence served to warn any African Americans who might challenge Jim Crow that there were no legal limits on the power that the region’s whites had over black lives. Accordingly, whereas in the years immediately preceding 1885, lynch mobs had targeted as many whites as blacks, in the second half of the decade, African Americans became the primary target of lynching, especially in the South where the practice was all but reserved for blacks.
The racialization of lynching was a product of the resurgence of white political power in the post-Reconstruction South. Just one of many forms of extralegal violence, lynching is difficult to define with precision. Indeed, lynchings are distinguished from other forms of illicit violence less by the character or consequences of the lynchers’ assault on the victim than by the contexts in which the violence takes place. In other words, although popular images of lynching usually conjure up a hanging—an image now immortalized by Billie Holiday’s famous rendition of the haunting song “Strange Fruit”—other forms of murder and violence can also be called lynching. As was true in Memphis, lynching victims in the Jim Crow South often faced execution at gunpoint. What distinguishes lynchings from all other forms of murder is not any specific type of violence, but the lynchers’ claims to justification and social legitimacy.25
Lynching has its antecedents in Anglo-American traditions of mob punishment. These typically included the tarring and feathering or flogging of individuals suspected of criminal behavior, and prior to the nineteenth century were not usually lethal. Vigilante justice of this sort proliferated during the American Revolution, when it was used against colonial loyalists and came to be associated with a Quaker patriot named Charles Lynch. A justice of the peace in the town of Chestnut Hill, Virginia, before the Revolutionary War, Lynch headed an informal court that dealt with suspected Tories and horse thieves—who generally sold the animals that they stole to the British—during the conflict. Whatever his Quaker commitment to nonviolence, it did not preclude corporal punishment. Defendants convicted in Judge Lynch’s court were tied to a nearby tree and given thirty-nine lashes. Thus the term “Lynch law” was born.26
Such popular tribunals became increasingly likely to mete out the death sentence in the nineteenth-century South, where they policed the increasingly volatile borders of the antebellum slave system. A lynch mob shot abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy in Illinois in 1837, after he refused to be silenced despite repeated attacks on his newspaper. He died guarding a new printing press he had ordered to keep his newspaper going after having lost several presses to previous white mobs. Likewise, both blacks and whites suspected of encouraging slave revolts were also subject to summary justice, which in the early nineteenth century came to be termed lynching. Lynch mobs also went after common criminals, especially in areas where courts were few and far between. But in the post-emancipation South, vigilante justice policed the color line, with courts quiescent if not outright complicit.
Organized by ex-Confederates in Pulaski, Tennessee, during the winter of 1865–66, the Ku Klux Klan, deploying whipping, arson, and murder, dedicated itself to discouraging not only black political participation, but also the education and economic independence of the freed people. Blacks were the Klan’s most frequent and numerous victims, but whites were also subject to Klan discipline. Other Klan victims included Northern white women—derisively known among white Southerners as “Oberlin girls”—who traveled South to teach ex-slaves, and white Republicans of both Southern and Northern origins, who were labeled scalawags and carpetbaggers, respectively. Outlawed under the Third Enforcement Act in 1871, the Klan only subsided after a sustained spree of racial violence, which scholars have estimated to include anywhere from four hundred to twenty thousand murders. Deemed as criminal at the time, at least by Republican observers, the Klan’s killings were not generally referred to as lynchings. But they helped establish mob violence as a powerful and effective means of suppressing black political participation and maintaining white supremacy—to which white Southerners would return again and again.
Despite this history of politically motivated violence, in the eyes of most late nineteenth-century Americans, the resurgence of racial violence in the South testified neither to political tensions between the races nor even to the Democrats’ drive for a “white man’s” government. Such possibilities were utterly obscured in a fog of racist ideology that defined lynching as the whit
e South’s first line of defense against the naturally lawless and predatory Negro male. This ideology was the product of an era when black men were routinely turned into criminals by an exploitative all-white legal system. A web of racially discriminatory laws was used to make convict laborers out of African American men imprisoned for a host of petty offenses, including crimes as dubious as “vagrancy”—which in the Jim Crow South boiled down to being black and without work.
Moreover, by the 1880s, the criminalization of African American males drew increasingly on Victorian ideas about male sexuality and the evolution of the races. Masculine sexual restraint was thought to be a civilized attribute entirely lacking in “savage” peoples such as the Negro race, whose development lagged behind that of whites. Indeed, this deficiency was both the cause and the effect of black inferiority, according to authorities such as the eminent scholar John W. Burgess, one of the founders of American political science. Burgess taught his students at Columbia University that “a black skin means membership in a race which has never of itself subjugated passion to reason, and has never therefore created any civilization of any kind.” The “antithesis of both white men and civilization,” black men were alleged to have a special propensity toward rape, as well as a desire for white women. These ideas were a product of the confluence of the ideological needs of white supremacy in an imperial and post-emancipation era and new Social Darwinist notions of race that stressed white middle-class sexual mores as a key element in the race’s evolutionary success. Such ideas were still relatively new in the 1890s. Indeed, as late as 1904, rape was described as the “new Negro crime” in Harper’s Weekly magazine. But the notion of a black rapist seems to have been an instant commonplace to many white Americans. A few months before the 1892 Memphis lynchings, for example, The New York Times noted that the offense of rape was “one to which the African race was particularly prone.”27
As useful as it was compelling, the myth of the black rapist provided a powerful justification for the rising tide of white violence against black men in the late nineteenth-century South, and it was often invoked irrespective of the circumstances in which the violence took place. Nowhere was this clearer than in the aftermath of the Memphis lynchings of 1892, which Memphis’s white newspapers soon began to attribute to an allegation of rape, despite the fact that the victims, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart, were never accused of sexual improprieties of any kind. After their arrest, these pillars of Memphis’s middle-class black community were denounced in the white press as “desperadoes” from the “tough desperate element of the colored community.”28 Moreover, in the months following their deaths, as whites in Memphis grew increasingly defensive about the lynchings, they began to invoke rape as a justification for the killings. The Memphis Scimitar, for example, defended the murders of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart with reference to a noble but ultimately unavoidable contest. “Whenever it comes to the conflict between the races,” its editors declared, “the Scimitar is for the grand old Anglo-Saxon every time, no matter what the original cause.” And The Appeal-Avalanche lost sight of the facts in the Memphis lynchings altogether when confronted with editorials condemning the city in the Boston and Chicago papers. When “an unprotected woman is assaulted,” The Appeal-Avalanche declared by way of reply, “Chivalrous men in the neighborhood will forget that there are such things as courts.”29
The blatant falsehoods Memphis’s white press used in defense of the lynchings came as a revelation to Wells, who had never previously observed the creation of the racial fictions used to cloak vigilante violence at their point of origin. An avid reader of the black press, she was well aware of the rising tide of white-on-black violence that had swept the South since the mid-1880s. But nothing in her previous experience had prepared her to see upstanding members of her own community first brutally killed and then viciously defamed by local whites.
In Memphis Wells had lived within a relatively sheltered environment, so far as racial violence was concerned. Lynchings were far more common in the isolated rural areas of the South, where blacks were far more exposed, than they were in densely populated urban areas with large black populations. Before the events at the Curve, Memphis had not seen a lynching in decades. Often closely tied to labor struggles between white landlords and black tenants, rural lynchings tended to increase when cotton prices declined. And unlike the events in Memphis, such lynchings typically took place far from any public or African American press scrutiny.
In particular, the link between lynching and rape—which Ida saw so falsely trumpeted in the Memphis case—could rarely be disproved in the aftermath of many rural lynchings. News of such lynchings usually came via brief wire reports that summarized the South’s white newspaper accounts of mob violence. Drawn from papers that “praised the vigilantes as peacekeepers against outbreaks of black crime and violence” in general and assaults on white women in particular, the wire reports afforded readers little insight into the circumstances behind the lynchings they chronicled.30 Instead, as lynchings proliferated during the 1880s, they were generally linked to a rising tide of black sex crimes in ways that began to trouble even black observers.31
Indeed, Wells herself had temporized over the causes of lynching before the events in Memphis opened her eyes to what “lynching really was.” Like many of her black contemporaries, she condemned extralegal violence against blacks, but was more uncertain about defending black men who were accused of rape. Prior to the Memphis murders, Wells recalled in her autobiography, she had deplored lynching as “irregular and contrary to law and order.” But she had never entirely rejected the claimed motives behind it. If “unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to lynching,” she speculated, “perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life”—an attitude that helps explain why her most heated critique of a lynching prior to 1892 focused on a case in which the victim was a black female. Not until the murders of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart did she begin to question the rape allegations against black men that were so frequently invoked in defense of lynching. As she watched the aftermath of their murders unfold, Wells began to suspect that lynching might be little more than “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the nigger down.’”32
Although most directly a product of the mayhem in Memphis, Wells’s suspicions about the character of lynching also built on her own experience with rumor and character defamation. As a single woman, whose independence had brought charges of immorality, and as a black woman whose attempt to ride in the ladies’ car had branded her a troublemaker, Wells knew from bitter experience that character defamation was a tool Southerners used to fight off challenges to their region’s sexual and racial order.
Moreover, her analysis of what “lynching really was” was confirmed when she began to research every lynching that she read about during the violent spring of 1892.33 She found what had happened in Memphis was not unusual: fully two-thirds of the victims of lynch mobs were never even accused of rape. She also found that many of those accused of rape were charged on the flimsiest of evidence. The very week Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were lynched, for example, another black man was briefly jailed for rape in Memphis, despite the absence of any complaint against him. Discovered in a white woman’s room, a Mr. Stricklin was charged with rape “and would have been lynched” but for the fact that the white woman in question insisted on his release.34 A furniture dealer from whom the woman had recently bought curtains, Stricklin was saved because his customer intervened to explain he had only entered her room to install her new curtains. Although guilty of no crime, Stricklin was fortunate to escape with his life, since the false accusations behind many lynchings often only came to light after their target had already been murdered by an angry white mob—if they came to light at all.
Wells also found that rape accusations that were proved false only after the mob had done its work were somet
imes documented in the news reports, alongside the stories of their tragic results. A white correspondent for The Sun (Baltimore), for instance, reported that a black man lynched for the rape of a white woman in Chestertown, Maryland, had in fact been innocent. The rapist was known to be a white man who had left town. Indeed, even “the girl herself maintained that her assailant was a white man.” But evidently her rapist went unpunished. Once a white man was identified as the true culprit, authorities dropped her rape case altogether, explaining “that they wished to spare the girl the mortification of having to testify in court.”35
Where such evidence was lacking, Wells conducted her own investigation. More often than not, she found that rape allegations against black men had been triggered by the exposure of consensual relationships between black men and white women. Following up on Associated Press reports about “a big, burly brute” who was lynched in Tunica County, Mississippi, for the alleged crime of raping the town sheriff’s seven-year-old daughter, Wells visited and found out that the sheriff’s daughter was not seven “but more than seventeen years old.” Moreover, on the day of the lynching she had been discovered by her father while she was visiting her alleged rapist—a black man who worked in the sheriff’s household—in his cabin. The mortified sheriff “led the mob against him in order to save his daughter’s reputation.” In Natchez, Wells talked to the mother of a “handsome young mulatto man” who had been “horribly lynched for ‘rape’” after he had been seduced by the “beautiful daughter” of his employer.36 And she also uncovered the story of Ebenezer Fowler, “the wealthiest colored man in Isaquena, Mississippi,” who was not even suspected of anything as forcible as rape when he was shot down by a lynch mob in 1885. His crime was “writing a note to a white woman,” which proved that “there was an intimacy between them.”37
