by Mia Bay
Among them was the Congregationalist minister B. A. Imes, one of the conciliatory black leaders who rose to prominence in Memphis in the wake of Wells’s departure. A former ally whose activism Wells had once admired, Imes turned on the Free Speech editor after she left, making her the subject of “an indignation meeting for all the colored people in the city.” Organized on the heels of Wells’s first antilynching article in The New York Age, the meeting ended with a resolution to denounce Wells in The Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis). The denunciation came in the form of a letter to the Memphis paper, written by Imes and two other black men, who expressed “a most positive disapproval of the course pursued by Miss Ida Wells” and observed that “virtue cannot be encouraged by polluting the minds of the innocent and the pure.”9 Although petty and mean-spirited, their attack on Wells illuminated the dangerous path she trod in speaking out against lynching. A young single woman, she could easily be associated with the immorality she sought to expose. Outside of Memphis, however, Wells’s reputation was spared by the powerful allies who helped to defend her and promoted her cause. Among the first to do so were some of Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s most accomplished and well-to-do African American women.
“The Best Womanhood of…Two Cities”
Long adept at navigating a man’s world, Wells sustained her journalistic career in New York with the help of T. Thomas Fortune and Jerome B. Peterson. But her career as a public speaker was not launched by these male editors. Wells made her debut as an outspoken opponent of lynching with the support of a group of black New Yorkers far less inured to the hurly-burly of the public sphere than Fortune or Peterson. In particular, New York Age reporter Victoria Earle Matthews and Brooklyn educator Maritcha Lyons, two eminently respectable members of New York’s black middle class, reached out to Wells. Appalled by her revelations in The New York Age, they decided that the women of New York and Brooklyn should “do something to show appreciation” of Wells’s work and “protest the treatment” she had received.10 Accordingly, they formed the Ida B. Wells Testimonial Reception Committee and began planning an event in her honor.
Although a newcomer to the city, Wells had managed to attract powerful allies whose endorsement would go far toward countering any and all attacks on her reputation. Maritcha Lyons, in particular, was a member of one of New York’s most elite black families. The Lyonses traced their free black ancestry back to the eighteenth century, and proudly claimed a mixed-race ancestry that included Native American and English forebears. Although committed to racial uplift, elite black families such as the Lyonses tended to distance themselves from the mass of black New Yorkers—including slave-born Southern migrants such as Wells. The majority cloistered themselves among their social equals in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, where they could confine their “social intercourse…to people one knows or knows about.”11 Still, the Lyons family’s social status did not shelter them from racial discrimination or violence, which may help explain Maritcha’s willingness to lend support to a young exile from Tennessee. More than a decade older than Wells, Lyons had nearly lost her life in the New York draft riots in 1863, when armed white rioters gutted her family’s Manhattan home. The Lyonses were forced to flee to Providence, Rhode Island, where sixteen-year-old Maritcha was barred from entering public school until her mother successfully sued the state to gain her admission. Despite hostile classmates who refused to sit next to her, Maritcha excelled in school and went on to become an assistant principal in the Brooklyn public school system, but she never forgot that “I had to sue for a privilege which any but a colored girl would have had without asking.”12
Following in her mother’s footsteps, in 1892 Lyons swung into action on behalf of another “lonely, homesick girl”—to borrow Wells’s description of herself at that time.13 Working through church networks, Lyons, together with Matthews and other New York–area black women, raised money to support Wells’s writing career. They also organized a lavish public event in her honor. More than two hundred black men and women from New York, Brooklyn, Boston, and Philadelphia gathered to pay homage to Wells in New York’s Lyric Hall on October 5, 1892. In doing so they launched Wells on a career as a public speaker that would bring her international renown—and, in some quarters, new enemies.
If Wells’s recollections are to be believed, she had no such future in mind when she mounted the speaker’s platform to deliver her first “honest-to-goodness address.”14 Instead, facing the impressive gathering, she became terrified and tearful. She had always been something of an outsider to the Memphis black female elite, and had received more support from that city’s black male leaders than its women. In New York, by contrast, she was embraced by “the best womanhood of…two cities”—Manhattan and Brooklyn. She found the experience both gratifying and intimidating. On the speaker’s platform with her were elite New Yorkers such as Maritcha Lyons and Brooklyn’s Susan M. McKinney, one of the nation’s first black female physicians. Also present was Sarah Garnet. A teacher from a wealthy family, Garnet was the first black woman to reach the rank of principal in the New York City school system, and also well known as the widow of Henry Highland Garnet, one of the leading lights of the antebellum abolitionist movement that Wells revered. Moreover, similarly well-placed African American women from other states also lent their support to Wells as she spoke. Fellow journalist Gertrude Bustill Mossell, a member of black Philadelphia’s high society, traveled to New York to honor Wells, as did finishing school graduate Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a writer and reformer from a long-established Boston family. Wells spoke with these guests of honor arrayed behind her on the platform. Ida had lectured before, but her nerves were understandable. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her to speak before so august an assembly.15 Moreover, her testimonial reception was unlike anything she and quite possibly all of the women assembled there had ever attended.
Lavishly funded and beautifully staged, the event bore the imprint of the black North’s female elite, who had no previous record of organizing on behalf of black activists. They were, however, well versed in planning elegant social events. The Ida B. Wells Testimonial Reception Committee decorated Lyric Hall with flower arrangements that included an opulent floral “horn of plenty,” and backlit the hall’s stage with electric lights that spelled out “Iola.”16 Guests were met by ushers who wore white silk badges bearing the same name, and distributed a program printed on miniature copies of Free Speech. Moreover, the reception committee also honored Wells with gifts, presenting her with a gold brooch in the shape of a pen and five hundred dollars to help her start her own paper.
In addition to the gifts, the program featured speeches, resolutions, and music, but at the center of it was Wells herself. To counteract nervousness she planned to read from a prepared text, but was overcome by emotion as she did so. Always comfortable in battle, Wells was almost undone when she had to address a hall full of sympathetic female well-wishers. Recounting the hardships that led to her exile, she mourned “the scenes of struggle,…the friends who were scattered across the country.” Overwhelmed by a “feeling of loneliness and homesickness for the days and friends that were gone,” she spoke through tears at times. But she soldiered on even as her composure wavered, determined to make it through her story even after she had to signal for a handkerchief to dry her eyes and wipe her nose.17
The text of Wells’s speech at the Lyric Hall does not survive, but her autobiography records that she went on to read the same paper “as the one I read at the first meeting in New York” at other public addresses in the ensuing months.18 Accordingly, a published transcript of a speech that Wells delivered at Tremont Temple in Boston, in February 1893, can be used to illustrate some of the moments that might have brought Wells to tears. Her speech interspersed a hard-hitting account of the Memphis lynchings with wrenching personal testimony on the domestic sorrows that the lynchings left behind. Her last days in Memphis had been spent with newly widowed Betty Moss and her two young childr
en, and Wells gave powerful voice to that family’s bereavement. She recalled witnessing Betty rocking her sleeping infant son, Thomas Moss, Jr., in her arms, her “tears fall[ing] thick and fast…on his unconscious baby face” at the thought of “the sad fate of the father he will never see.” Still more poignant was her account of how “the baby daughter of Tom Moss, too young to express how she misses her father, toddles to the wardrobe, seizes the legs of his letter-carrier uniform, hugs and kisses them with evident delight and stretches her little hands to be taken up into arms that will never more clasp his daughter’s form.”19
Portrait of Ida, Betty Moss, and the Moss children
Wells had ample excuse for crying as she recounted events in Memphis for the first time, but she was “mortified” all the same. A woman who prided herself on her composure, she was not given to “public demonstrations” of emotion. Moreover, before her imposing Lyric Hall audience, she had wanted to be at her best to show her appreciation “of the splendid things those women had done.” Instead she succumbed to tears—“the woman’s weakness in public.” Years later, Wells still had “a feeling of chagrin over that exhibition of weakness.” Whatever her regrets, her tears could not have been more effective if she had planned them. Her tears, one prominent New Yorker who attended the event told her, “did more to convince cynical and selfish New Yorkers of the seriousness of lynching than anything else could have done.”20
Moreover, they also marked a high point in Wells’s status as an appealing female leader. For black women especially, as Wells’s contemporary Matilda Evans would later observe, the “fear of woman unsexing herself was the bug bear” of the era during which Wells rose to fame.21 Especially when it came to public appearances, middle-class African American women were silenced by ideals of womanhood that made it all but impossible for them to challenge racism and sexism without compromising their own claims to femininity. “Anger and femininity were antithetical” to the Victorian conception of a virtuous woman, making respectable public protest all but impossible. Indeed, advice writers cautioned that women should not even defend themselves from slander or false accusations. “Forever must virtue suffer from the widespread intimations of vice, and honor bow before imputations of shame,” lest any display of negative emotion turn ladies into “fishwomen and hucksters.” In New York’s Lyric Hall, tears took the edge off Wells’s angry testimony, eliding such concerns and making her into a womanly and sympathetic figure. Press reports of Wells’s lectures even noted her tearfulness, emphasizing approvingly that this “victim” of Southern mob violence was “moved to grief” as she spoke.22
Wells’s audiences were also moved. In the aftermath of their successful tribute to Wells, Maritcha Lyons and Victoria Earle Matthews decided not to disband the Wells Testimonial Reception Committee. Instead, it became the Women’s Loyal Union, New York City’s first African American women’s club. Likewise, after attending the Wells testimonial, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin went home to Boston and formed the New Era Club, the first such club in that city. Ruffin also organized similar clubs and speaking dates for Wells throughout New England, calling upon black women in New Haven, New Bedford, Providence, Newport, and other towns to host Wells and organize clubs of their own. In 1894, Ruffin went on to found The Woman’s Era: a monthly newspaper published by the New Era Club, it was the first black women’s newspaper.
In some respects, Wells was an unlikely inspiration for the black women’s club movement. Not only did she lack the elite background and social connections possessed by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and many of the women who went on to play prominent roles in the movement, but Wells was also far more radical and outspoken than most club women. Not surprisingly, though she would go on to help organize a black women’s club in Chicago in 1893, she never found an enduring place in that organization. A catalyst for the women’s club movement, Wells could never become a long-term club member herself.
In taking a public stand on lynching and Jim Crow, however, Wells did provide an example of women’s leadership that mobilized other African American women to organize on their own behalf. A new site of female activism, these African American women’s clubs took shape in an era when disenfranchisement, lynching, and racial discrimination had called into question black men’s capacities for race leadership. Early club women, such as Anna Julia Cooper, believed female leaders might well be an improvement on their black male counterparts, many of whom were tainted by the political corruption that marked 1890s politics. A black woman, Cooper noted in A Voice from the South, was “always sound and orthodox on questions affecting the well-being of her race. You do not find the colored woman selling her birthright for a mess of pottage.”23
Yet as the 1890s began, Cooper and her Northern middle-class contemporaries had not found any path to black female political influence. White women had “myriads of church clubs, social clubs, culture clubs, pleasure clubs and charitable clubs,” as Cooper noted; and black women likewise had a long history of volunteerism that included organizing mutual aid organizations, community schools, and cultural groups.24 But in an era when many white women were forming clubs dedicated to pursuing political issues such as civic improvement and women’s suffrage, black women were left out. Most white women’s clubs did not admit black women as members, and those that did could not be expected to provide them with a platform for race leadership.
Indeed, while Cooper extolled black women’s potential for leadership in A Voice from the South, she found the prospect of womanly self-assertion difficult to imagine. Feminine delicacy made her “purposely forebear to mention instances of personal injuries to colored women traveling in the less civilized sections of our country”—although she did go on to list such injuries as being “forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured.”25 Likewise, Wells’s Memphis contemporary Mary Church Terrell, a prominent women’s club leader, found such issues too “embarrassing and painful” to describe.26 Cooper, Terrell, and other middle-class black women of their day often avoided speaking freely about the racial and sexual slights for fear of drawing attention to themselves at a time when “derogatory images and negative stereotypes of black women’s sexuality” made black womanhood a fragile ideal. Instead, they adopted what historian Darlene Clark Hine has called “a culture of dissemblance” designed to shield “the truth of their inner life and selves from their oppressors.”27 This ladylike but unsatisfying pose left them looking to others for protection. Drawing upon traditional notions of gender hierarchy, Cooper called for black men “to be a father, a brother, a friend to every weak, struggling unshielded girl.”28
Wells had a very different vision of female race leadership. Used to defending herself, she had come out of Memphis determined to continue doing so—and carrying a pistol in her purse. Moreover, she must have been somewhat bemused to attract such a groundswell of female support, since her previous challenges to white injustice had never done so. In Tennessee, black men rather than black women had been her major supporters when she sued to secure a seat in the ladies’ car. And the limited support she had received from her community in her challenge to the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad had left her wondering whether the black elite was willing to support civil rights struggles such as her lawsuits.29 But her antilynching lectures inspired a different response, leaving Wells still remembering the “kind hearts” of her New York supporters many years later.30
The difference, in part, reflected the fact that Northeastern black communities provided far more fertile ground for Wells’s brand of activism than did those in Memphis, where black autonomy was more limited and white supremacy more powerful. But her change of scene does not fully explain the unprecedented organization and public activity that she inspired among her Northern peers. Indeed, even the popularity of her lectures does not account for why black female reformers rallied around antilynching. After all, lynching was only one of the many forms of racial violence
that Southern whites inflicted on African Americans in the late nineteenth century, and not obviously a women’s issue.
Usually a crime against men, lynching was ideologically linked to the indelicate subject of rape—a topic even more “embarrassing and painful” to middle-class blacks than the indignities that segregation imposed upon them. Indeed, even Wells herself had struggled with such fears prior to her exile. In Memphis in 1886, after publishing her first article on a lynching, she worried that “it may be unwise to express myself so strongly,” and thereafter remained largely silent on the subject until the Memphis lynchings of 1892.31 But by the time she moved to New York, Wells had developed a new understanding of lynching that allowed her to engage the subject without embarrassment or regret. A challenge to the rape myths used to justify lynching and silence its critics, her lectures recast lynching as a symbol of the gendered racial terror that was Jim Crow—opening up new rhetorical terrain for black women as a result.
