by Mia Bay
Wells’s discoveries about lynching enraged her, inspiring her to run a series of antilynching editorials in Free Speech. Some focused on local events. She castigated white Memphis, and especially its law enforcement officials, who claimed to be unable to identify the lynchers of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart, and she continued to encourage African Americans to leave. But Wells also presented her more general findings about lynching, producing an incendiary critique of the interlocking sexual and racial myths white Southerners used to justify the practice. Writing at a time when rape—the “new Negro crime”—was supposedly on the rise in the South, Wells took on the charge that white Southerners most often invoked as unassailable justification for lynching. Not only did her research reveal that most lynchings occurred in the absence of any accusations of rape, it also called into question many of the cases in which rape was alleged. All too often the accused black men were guilty of no other crime than having a sexual relationship with a white woman. Indeed, many of the cries of rape came only after clandestine interracial relationships were exposed.
Wells was not the first African American to doubt the allegations of rape that accompanied many lynchings. Blacks had long questioned many of the trumped-up stories of sexual assault used to justify acts of mob violence, but few had the courage to challenge public opinion on the subject. The black newspaperman J. C. Duke had been chased out of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1888, for publishing an article that attributed a spike in the number of lynchings to “the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos.”38 But Wells was the first journalist, black or white, to research the causes of lynching and amass evidence debunking the rape myth so often used as justification.
Enraged by her findings, she addressed the issue in no uncertain terms in an editorial in Free Speech on May 21, 1892. “Eight Negroes lynched since the last issue of ‘Free Speech,’” she wrote, in a laconic style clearly designed to underscore the routine nature of the violence, “one at Little Rock where the citizens broke (?) into the Penitentiary and got their man; three near Anniston, Ala., one near New Orleans—on the same old racket, the new alarm about raping white women—; and three at Clarkesville, Ga., for killing a white man. The same programme of hanging, then shooting bullets into the bodies was carried out to the letter.” Equally routine, Ida emphasized, were the false accusations of rape that accompanied five of the lynchings. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she flatly stated. “If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the reputation of their women.”39
A mixture of courage and rage fueled Ida’s red flag of an editorial. She published this open attack on the morals of white women at a time when—as she herself noted—white Southerners routinely invoked the sanctity of white womanhood as a justification for violence against blacks. Moreover, she was well aware that J. C. Duke had had to leave Montgomery after his editorial allusion to “white Juliets” and “colored Romeos.” Duke had taken refuge in Memphis, where Wells had learned enough about his experience to comment on it in an April 1892 article on the “Requirements of Southern Journalism.” Reflecting on Duke’s experience, she had then noted that outspoken editors might have to be on the “hop, skip, and the jump” in the South. So she must have suspected that her own equally intemperate editorial might endanger her standing in Memphis. However, as before, when she wrote a “dynamitic” article for the Gate City Press in the aftermath of a lynching, Wells seems to have been too furious to be discreet: her tersely written editorial crackles with rage. Still, she was not without caution. She sent her editorial to the printer just prior to leaving on a long-planned three-week trip to Philadelphia and New York, and was relaxing on an eastbound train when Free Speech hit the newsstands.
The Death of Free Speech
As it turned out, Wells’s trip east was well-timed. Traveling first to Philadelphia, she attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s general conference on the invitation of her old friend Bishop Henry MacNeal Turner. Although not much impressed with the deliberations at the conference, Wells enjoyed her reception there. “All the big guns…made a lot of fuss over our only woman editor,” she recalled in her autobiography.40 The luminaries she met with included the denomination’s leader, Bishop Daniel A. Payne, who struck Ida as the very “ideal of what I thought a Bishop ought to be,” as well as fellow journalist Levi J. Coppin, who edited The A.M.E. Church Review, and his wife, Fanny Jackson Coppin, a prominent educator. Wells breakfasted with the Coppins and also enjoyed a tour of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, led by Mrs. Coppin, the school’s principal. Moreover, the trip gave Wells a chance to visit with Philadelphia’s well-known black author and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, whom Wells had met and hosted in Memphis the previous year. The sixty-two-year-old Harper offered to return the favor, inviting Wells to Philadelphia, and Wells was happy to oblige. An abolitionist and women’s rights activist, Harper was no doubt one of Wells’s few female role models. Widely published, Harper wrote not only nonfiction promoting her causes but also poetry and fiction—as Wells had long aspired to do. But as Wells was enjoying her Philadelphia visit, white Memphis was up in arms.
Shortly after her editorial first appeared, it was reprinted on the editorial page of The Memphis Commercial, accompanied by a call for Memphis whites to “avenge the insult to the honor of their women.” A subsequent editorial published in the Evening Scimitar, another Memphis newspaper, went still further. Writing on the assumption that the author of the Free Speech editorial was a man, the Scimitar’s editor threatened to tie “the wretch who has uttered these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him with a hot iron, and perform on him a surgical operation with a pair of tailors’ shears.” Evidently ready to make good on these threats, a group of angry whites gathered at the Memphis Merchants’ Exchange on February 27, 1892, and marched to the offices of Free Speech. Unable to find the paper’s editor, they destroyed its printing press and furniture, trashed its office, and left a note saying “anyone trying to publish the paper again would be punished with death.”41
The Free Speech was destroyed. Indeed, no copies of the pink paper have survived the destruction of its archives. Gone too, of course, was the flourishing business that Wells and her business partner, J. L. Fleming, had worked so hard to build. Fleming, to whom Wells’s article was first attributed, had managed to leave town one step ahead of the lynch mob, moving to Chicago, where he made an unsuccessful attempt to revive Free Speech. Without adequate money or equipment, the paper soon folded, leaving Fleming very bitter. “He blamed me,” Wells recorded in her autobiography, “and perhaps he was justified in doing so.”42
While her newspaper was being gutted, Wells was traveling up the East Coast toward New York. She first learned of the destruction of her paper and the threats against her life from T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of The New York Age, who met her train in Jersey City. A longtime correspondent with and supporter of Wells, Fortune had published many of her articles in his paper and had been delighted when she accepted his invitation to visit the New York area. “We’ve been a long time getting you to New York,” he told her at the station, “but now that you are here I’m afraid you will have to stay.”43
Copies of the morning news, which Fortune brought with him, told the full story. The Free Speech had been destroyed and Ida B. Wells had been identified as one of its owners. What was more, once her authorship was discovered, local whites wasted no time letting it be known that her gender would do nothing to protect her should she return. In place of castration, they posed other graphic threats. If they ever saw her again, as Wells recorded, “they would bleed my face and hang me in front of the court house.”44 By telegram, Wells soon assured herself of Fleming’s safety and that of her sister Lily—whom Wells arranged to send to California. Bu
t she also received additional warning about the threats against her; neighbors, she reported, told her that her “home was being watched by white men who promised to kill me on sight.” So despite offers of armed protection from Memphis’s black community, Wells decided to stay away, heeding the warnings of those who feared “more bloodshed, more widows, and orphans if I came back.”45
Wells, c. 1893
Indeed, Wells abandoned her home in Memphis without so much as collecting her belongings—never to return. Exactly how she felt as she faced her abrupt relocation is difficult to recover, since her Memphis diary ends in 1891 and none of her personal papers from that time have survived. Coming on top of the earlier loss of her parents in her teens, the recent death of her good friend Thomas Moss, and the loss of the profitable paper she had worked so hard to build, along with her home in a city that had fostered many of her hopes and dreams, it must have been devastating. But in her autobiography Wells recorded little sadness or depression. Instead, her losses seem to have motivated purposeful anger, as she once again faced adversity and came out swinging. Offered a one-quarter interest in The New York Age in return for her Free Speech subscription list, Wells accepted. She also signed on at the Age as a salaried weekly contributor. With the help of T. Thomas Fortune and the Age’s co-owner Jerome B. Peterson, Wells weathered the loss of her paper—“in which every dollar I had in the world was invested”—emerging even more determined to continue her “fight against lynching and lynchers.”46 She stayed in New York, she notes, less out of concern for her personal safety than because she thought she could better conduct that fight in her new location.
Accordingly, Wells used her displacement to expose the truth about lynching. In New York, “Iola” was reborn as “Exiled,” as Wells crafted a new identity as a refugee forced to flee the “Southern horrors” that countless other blacks still experienced. Written under her new nom de plume, her account of the Memphis lynchings and their aftermath appeared in a special issue of The New York Age designed to promote her story. Fortune and Peterson printed ten thousand copies of the issue and distributed them nationwide. Now no longer just a Southern girl, Wells addressed a wide audience. Her critique of lynching was equally wide-ranging. Long a critic of segregation, disenfranchisement, and mob violence against blacks, Wells linked them all in her discussion of the Memphis murders, fashioning a compelling new image of lynching as the “Southern horror” that sustained Jim Crow.
4
Exile
IDA’S EXILE RESHAPED HER LIFE. IT TOOK HER OUT OF THE South and out of the United States; transformed her from a journalist to a public figure; and launched her lifelong struggle to put an end to lynching. Most transformative, probably, was her first year out of Memphis, which saw her traverse the East Coast and travel to Britain and back in an attempt to find an effective platform for her antilynching crusade. That year, Wells received unprecedented public exposure as she gave personal testimony on the evils of Jim Crow and faced daunting new social challenges as a result. Far from her Memphis social networks, she had to establish herself in a new environment that would soon expand well beyond New York. Often embattled or ill at ease, Wells was under unrelenting public scrutiny as she waged a high-profile battle against lynching. Thirty years old and still unmarried at a time when most of her female contemporaries were raising children, she was subject to a new round of slanderous attacks on her personal life. Such attacks were nothing new and may well have grown less personally hurtful as she grew increasingly used to them. But Wells could not ignore them, since questions about her credibility threatened to compromise the effectiveness of her antilynching work. So Wells’s first year in exile saw her struggling to establish both herself and her cause.
Her struggles were compounded by the fact that women lecturers were still a rarity in the 1890s. Indeed, as late as April 1892 Wells sat silent on the platform of a New York antilynching meeting while T. Thomas Fortune and other men described her experiences. However, the 1890s marked the beginning of a new “women’s era,” when “far less of the world was off limits to women than it had been fifty years earlier.”1 Across the color line, an assertive new generation of educated young women became increasingly active in reform movements, organized women’s clubs, and supported women’s suffrage. Among black women, Wells helped galvanize this change, breaking new ground as a female speaker in the fall of 1892, when her columns for The New York Age began to attract invitations to lecture. Wells had taken elocution lessons in Memphis and had spoken at National Press Association conferences well before 1892. Poised, attractive, and forceful, she proved to be a popular speaker, credited with having “greater power…to hold the attention of her audience” than any other woman of her race.2
Particularly captivating to those who attended Wells’s lectures were her allusions to rape and sex in an era when public discussion of such matters was taboo. This was the late nineteenth century, the Victorian era, a time still known for the sexual reticence of its public discourse. So the boldness with which Wells engaged every aspect of the subject of lynching must have shocked her audiences. Her dissection of the sexual politics that lay behind lynching came at a time when the Comstock law of 1873 barred Americans from disseminating any kind of “obscene literature” by mail—up to and including information on contraception, as the birth control activist Margaret Sanger would find out in 1914.3
But Wells was intent on convincing her audiences that lynching was an obscenity, much like slavery: a form of racial violence that clouded both victim and crime in shame. Moreover, she also believed that lynching, like slavery, could be combated only with exposure and public protest. Inspired by the abolitionist movement’s successful fight to end slavery, Wells called for “the Garrison, Douglass, Sumner, Whittier, and Phillips who shall rouse this nation to a demand that…mob rule shall be put down and equal and exact justice be accorded to every citizen.”4
Not surprisingly, Wells’s approach won her no friends in the South, where the abolitionist movement was still vilified and Wells’s antilynching campaign soon became subject to endless derision. But her cause did capture the imagination of reform-minded men and women both in the United States and abroad, mobilizing an antilynching movement that would long outlive Wells herself—as would, alas, the phenomenon of lynching itself. Among her early allies was Frederick Douglass, one of the abolitionist heroes she hoped to emulate. In his seventies but still politically active and very influential, Douglass befriended Wells, hosting her on several visits to Washington and lending his name to the antilynching pamphlets she published. Moreover, he also helped her expand the scope of her antilynching campaign by commending her to British reformer Catherine Impey—who would arrange a speaking tour that would take Wells to Scotland and England.
Never popular among American whites, Wells’s antilynching crusade would be most effective in Britain. There she spoke before audiences with a long history of antislavery activism, who would ultimately add influential support to her work. A refugee from racial violence in the New South and a Douglass protégée, Wells appealed to the national pride of British reformers when she asked them to condemn lynching with the same vigor with which they had once condemned slavery. A far-ranging response to events in Memphis, Wells’s international antilynching campaign would have only mixed success its first year—although not for lack of effort on her part. Between the spring of 1892 and the spring of 1893, she had one of the busiest and most challenging years in her always busy life, and transformed herself from editor of a small Southern newspaper to the “most noted race woman of her day.”5
Ida’s rise to fame began in June 1893 with the publication of her seven-column story on the Memphis lynchings in The New York Age. Fortune’s special edition of the Age featuring Wells’s article received wide circulation, but drew a mixed response among black journalists, who provided Ida with an early harbinger of the often hostile scrutiny she would receive as her reputation grew. As an outspoken black female critic of white racial vi
olence, Wells threatened male leaders, both black and white. Accordingly, her first critics were black men—who were far more likely to read The New York Age than their white counterparts. “She seeks fame and gets notoriety,” sniped C. H. Taylor of The American Citizen (Kansas City). An open opponent of lynching, Taylor did not disparage Wells’s cause. Rather, as a fellow journalist, he seems to have felt eclipsed by her work.6 He was not the only one. An editorial in The Indianapolis Freeman resorted to verse to poke fun at the attention lavished on Wells. “Crown her with flowers / Sprinkle her with perfume,” declared an ungraceful but cutting little poem, “…Until you carry it ad nauseum.” A later issue of the Freeman carried an apology that hardly improved on the poem. Although the editors denied implying “that Miss Wells is a fisher of compliments and praise from any source,” they undercut their denial by noting that such behavior was all too common among journalists. “We can conceive of women,” the editors noted coyly, “and of men too, by the score, bewhiskered, stentorian voiced barnacles of the press, who might cry their eyes out for the compliments that never came…but of this somewhat unfortunate young woman, we had thought no such thing.”7
Potentially more damaging to Wells than any of these sarcastic remarks was a critique coming out of Memphis. It came from some of the black leaders who chose to remain in the troubled city, where racial tensions remained high. They proved willing to turn on Wells to appease white leaders. As a result, in the months that followed her departure in 1892, Wells was denounced by African American leaders who had far more reason to resent Memphis whites than they did Wells. In the wake of the Memphis lynchings, the city’s white leaders remained unrepentant about the white-on-black violence involved and instead moved to punish local black men who had been jailed alongside Moss, McDowell, and Stewart for participating in the conflicts that preceded the lynching. During the summer of 1892, Memphis authorities indicted six black men who had supported the owners of the People’s Grocery, sentencing them to prison and workhouse terms ranging from eleven months to fourteen years, even as the white men who lynched Moss, McDowell, and Stewart remained unidentified and unprosecuted.8 Memphis blacks were infuriated by this injustice but too terrified to protest. Public censure from individuals such as Wells had only made Memphis whites more hostile, and further violence was a real possibility, especially since the courts had made it clear that Memphis blacks could not look to the city’s courts for legal protection. Increasingly anxious to appease the city’s white leaders, some of Memphis’s remaining African American leaders even turned their anger on Wells in a vain attempt to restore racial harmony by attacking the city’s most notorious exile.
