To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Accordingly, Douglass was distressed to note that as late as October 1892, when Wells visited him while lecturing in Washington, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago showed little promise of according better treatment to black Americans. Once again, African Americans had been excluded from the event’s exhibits, planning, and construction work, and would be required to attend on a special “Colored People’s Day.” Douglass had been offered a role in the proceedings, but not as a representative of his own people or country. Instead, Haitian officials had invited the former U.S. minister and consul to their country to preside over the Haitian pavilion. Douglass welcomed the invitation, both on its own merits and because he viewed the Columbian Exposition as an international stage on which to air African American grievances. And after attending Wells’s lecture, Douglass began to envision a Chicago protest featuring the “Southern horrors” described by Wells. He proposed that they work together to produce a pamphlet offering “an exposition, by paintings, drawing and written accounts of lynchings, hangings, burnings at the stake, whippings, and all southern atrocities” for distribution to visitors to the Columbian Exposition.52 Wells readily agreed, and the two had begun work on the pamphlet when Wells got sidetracked: in the spring of 1893 a series of events moved her antilynching campaign abroad.

  In early 1893, before Wells and Douglass even began to work on the pamphlet, a particularly brutal lynching in Paris, Texas, made international news, and soon had Wells taking her antilynching campaign abroad. A sleepy east Texas community of less than nine thousand, Paris hosted a crowd that exceeded its own population on February 1, 1893, when its residents lynched a black man named Henry Smith, suspected of assaulting a four-year-old white girl. Apprehended by authorities in Arkansas, Smith had tried to escape the vengeance that the townspeople had planned for him, but it only made matters worse. Once captured, he was sent back to Paris for a lynching that was essentially advertised en route. The train carrying Smith “gathered strength from various towns,” as “people crowded upon platforms and tops of coaches anxious to see the lynching and the negro who was soon to be delivered to the infuriated mob.” By the time Smith reached Paris, ten thousand spectators from as far away as Arkansas had gathered to watch him be tortured and executed. They were not disappointed. With the enthusiastic support of the crowd, Smith’s executioners bound him on a scaffold built to stage his death and tortured him with “red-hot irons” for fifty minutes, burning out his eyes and throat and searing off his skin from limb to limb.53 He died, as one news account noted, “of slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh.”54 And when his body finally stopped moving, the crowd set Smith’s scaffold on fire and watched his body burn before fighting “over the hot ashes for bones, buttons and teeth for souvenirs.”55

  In Washington when the story of the Texas lynching broke, Wells was horrified and deeply disturbed. She learned of the execution from dispatches that described the violence against Smith in detail, and without editorial disapproval. “Another Negro Burned,” reported The New York Times, presenting a graphic account of the “awful vengeance of a Paris (Texas) mob.” The Washington Post emphasized the dead man’s alleged crime with a headline proclaiming: “His Victim a Mere Babe.” The Post followed up with an editorial published a few days later contending that lynching was the appropriate punishment for the crime Smith was alleged to have committed—an allegation the Post found “easy to believe.”56 Wells, of course, disagreed. Convinced that African Americans should begin to “investigate every lynching” and thus “have the facts to use in an appeal to public opinion,” she hired the prestigious Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate the events behind Smith’s death, instructing the agency to use a man from their Chicago office who could be hoped to investigate the crime without bias.57 The Pinkerton instead sent out a man from their Kansas office. He did not even investigate the crime, submitting a packet of press clippings on the lynching from Texas papers and a picture of four-year-old Myrtle Vance, Smith’s alleged victim.

  Stymied by a lack of information, Wells’s attempt to mobilize public opinion against lynching hit a low point. In Washington, D.C., to lecture on “Lynchings in the South” in the city’s Metropolitan Church, she had been trying for months without success to get her message across to white audiences. Her lectures had not attracted white audiences or white press coverage outside of Boston, a liberal-minded city with a proud abolitionist tradition. And her efforts to get a hearing from the nation’s white leaders had proved equally fruitless. Attempts to get her an audience with the Senate Judiciary Committee had failed, as had Frederick Douglass’s invitation, delivered in person, to President Benjamin Harrison to attend Wells’s Washington lecture—“the President regretted his inability to be present.”58

  Moreover, the murder in Paris, Texas, marked the advent of an even more frightening form of lynching. According to historian Grace Hale, it was “the founding event in the history of spectacle lynching”—a term that Hale coins to describe the turn-of-the-century lynchings that attracted thousands of primarily Southern white viewers.59 The Paris lynching dramatized just how comfortable Americans were with vigilante justice against African Americans. Women and children had attended the grisly event. A friend of Wells’s traveling through Texas not long after Smith’s death was shocked to hear it remembered by a white woman and her eight-year-old daughter. “I saw them burn the nigger, didn’t I Mamma,” proclaimed the little girl, a fact her “complacent mother” acknowledged “as matter of factly as if she had said she saw them burn a pile of trash.”60

  Wells could not have known in the winter of 1893 that the gruesome public burning of Smith was an early portent of many spectacle lynchings. Instead, the unprecedented mass brutality that took place in Texas must have made Wells question the impact of her antilynching campaign. Her appeal to “public opinion” could not transcend its limited audience of primarily Northern blacks, while white Americans seemed more entertained than appalled by Smith’s brutal murder.

  British public responses were less sanguine, however. The Times (London) described Smith’s lynching as “the most revolting execution of the age and a disgrace to the State [of Texas].”61 And, fortunately for Wells, the events in Texas caught the attention of two energetic British reformers. One of them was Catherine Impey, a British Quaker who was the founder and editor of an anti-imperialist journal called Anti-Caste (1888–95). A resident of Street, Somerset, a village in the southwest of England that was one of the nation’s Quaker strongholds, Impey hailed from an antislavery family. Born in 1847, she was raised by abolitionist parents who boycotted slave-grown cotton and sugar and had hosted the slave fugitive William Wells Brown when he lectured in England. Still committed to racial justice long after emancipation had settled the question for many of her countrymen, Catherine honored her family’s activist tradition by founding Anti-Caste. Unlike most English observers, Impey had followed America’s increasingly violent post–Civil War race relations and was well aware of lynching as a distinctive American practice even before Smith’s grisly death.

  British reformer Catherine Impey, on the right, with her sister Nellie

  The fall before the Texas lynching, Impey had visited the United States, also investigating “the color question” for her magazine. Among the friends Impey visited on her trip were Helen and Frederick Douglass, who probably introduced her to Wells’s work. After staying with the Douglasses in September 1892, Impey went on to attend two of Wells’s lectures. She was on hand when Ida introduced an antilynching resolution at the National Press Association meeting in September 1892, and later in the fall Impey made a point of attending Wells’s lecture at the November convocation of the A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia. There the British woman introduced herself to Wells and arranged to interview her for Anti-Caste. Impey was anxious to give Wells’s “lynching stories” greater exposure. Appalled by the “indifference” to lynching she found among American whites, she hoped that the British public would be more willi
ng to censure an “evil…so glaring, so terrible.”62

  Not surprisingly then, when the lynching of Henry Smith made international news, Impey immediately thought of Wells. At that time, Impey was visiting with Scottish novelist Isabelle Fyvie Mayo, who wrote under the pseudonym Edward Garrett. Widowed, and slightly older than Impey, Mayo had sympathized with the abolitionist movement as a child, had grown up taking an interest in race relations, and had boarded South Asian students in her Aberdeen home. When news of the Texas lynching reached Scotland, a shocked Mayo asked Impey “why the United States of America was burning human beings alive in the nineteenth-century as the red Indians were said to have done three hundred years before?”63 Impey could not explain it, but suggested that her new acquaintance Ida B. Wells would be able to do so, at which point Impey and Mayo decided to invite Wells to bring her antilynching message to Britain.

  Impey also suggested that they recruit her friend Albion Tourgée as a “follow-up lecturer who could supplement Wells’ testimony with that of a ‘white American champion of the cause.’” A judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction and counsel for the plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Ohio-born Tourgée was one of his era’s most outspoken white critics of segregation and black disenfranchisement. The author of several popular novels about Reconstruction, during the 1880s and 1890s Tourgée also wrote a regular column for Chicago’s leading Republican newspaper, the Daily Inter Ocean. Eminent, educated, and fiercely opposed to lynching, Tourgée would have provided excellent support for Wells’s crusade, but proved unwilling to travel to England. Perennially strapped for cash, Tourgée sent his regrets, enclosing a grisly postcard of a lynching sent to him by a member of the mob. Wells and Impey would later use it to illustrate their cause.64

  Wells, by contrast, accepted with alacrity—despite her own uncertain finances. Visiting with Frederick Douglass and his wife when she received Impey’s invitation, she was encouraged by Douglass, who told her to go. Moreover, as Wells would later recall, the invitation came as “an open door in a wall.” More isolated than Tourgée, whose increasingly unpopular views could at least still command an audience, Wells had not been able to “reach the white people of the country, who alone could mold public sentiment.”65 Impey’s invitation offered Wells access to a potentially influential British audience, giving her a chance to replicate the successful transatlantic protest strategies pursued by black abolitionists such as William Wells Brown and Douglass himself.

  Moreover, at the same time, Impey’s invitation provided Wells with an escape from the only whites whose attention her public lectures managed to secure: her enemies in Memphis. On Wells’s mind as she contemplated her British trip was a vicious attack on her published in the December 15, 1892, Memphis Commercial. The Memphis Commercial, which had evidently been following her lecture tour, described her speaking in Boston before an audience of “thin-legged scholars” and “glass-eyed females.” The paper’s account of Wells’s personal history was even more unflattering. Denouncing her as a “black harlot,” The Memphis Commercial claimed that her story of exile was false. Wells had not even written the infamous editorial concerning the Curve lynchings; she was merely the “mistress of the scoundrel” who had—presumably, her former business partner Fleming. A floozy peddling the story for her own gain, Wells now toured the East Coast in search of a white husband.66

  Although The Memphis Commercial’s freewheeling attack sounds almost comical today, it posed a serious and demoralizing threat to Wells’s reputation. As an unmarried thirty-year-old woman far from home, she was more vulnerable than ever to sexual slander, especially when it came from a hometown source. Fortunately, Wells did not have to face the slander alone. Black women in Boston rallied to support her, founding a local branch of the National Women’s Colored League as a platform for their defense of Wells. Electing the energetic Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin as president, they issued a unanimous resolution condemning “the foulest aspersions of one of the daily papers of Memphis” and affirming their “confidence in Miss Wells’ purity of purpose and character.”67 Likewise, the black press also came to Wells’s defense, lambasting The Memphis Commercial for “wantonly and ruthlessly slandering the good name of Miss Ida B. Wells.” The white paper’s attacks only strengthened Wells’s case, the Topeka Weekly Call suggested, providing “evidence that the boasted Southern chivalry was a thing of the past.”68

  Not content with these rebuttals, Wells investigated taking legal action against The Memphis Commercial. The editors of the Memphis paper had, after all, questioned not only her personal morality but also her professional integrity. Accordingly, Wells fired off a letter to the best-known jurist she knew, Albion Tourgée.

  Wells asked Tourgée for a “clear, impartial opinion” on the wisdom of suing The Memphis Commercial. She would also need to find legal counsel should the case go forward, she explained. Memphis had only two black lawyers: Thomas J. Cassells, who still resented Wells for replacing him with a more energetic white lawyer in her lawsuit against the railroad; and her former friend Josiah Settle, who had become “the enemy of the Free Speech” after one of Wells’s articles had criticized a friend of his. Both men “were sycophants,” Wells informed Tourgée, with characteristic frankness. They “did not half defend their clients and the Free Speech…I chided them for it…with more zeal than discretion.”69 Already embroiled in the legal case that would lead to Plessy, Tourgée told Wells that he “could not afford to do any more gratuitous legal work himself.” But he also offered to pass her case along to a colleague, the Chicago lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett, who had agreed to represent Wells without remuneration.

  Although raised largely in Chicago, where his family resettled in 1869, Barnett originally hailed from Tennessee and proved willing to take the case contemplated by a woman from his home state. Trained at the Chicago College of Law—which later became the Northwestern University Law School—Barnett may have been sympathetic to his new client because they shared similar professional histories as well as regional origins. Like Wells, he had been a teacher at one point, and a newspaper editor as well. Indeed, the energetic and politically minded Barnett had founded Chicago’s first African American newspaper, the Conservator, in 1878—the same year he began his law practice. A passionate “race man,” Barnett established the Conservator to promote “the welfare of the Negro group”—a statement which also reflected the Conservator’s status as the first newspaper to capitalize the “n” in the word “Negro.”70 Moreover, he probably also identified with his new client’s political views. Like Wells, Barnett had used his paper to attack mob violence against black men and lambaste black politicians who put their own interests over those of their people. Writing in the 1880s, Barnett sounded very much like Ida herself when he bemoaned the lynching of a man charged with an “attempt at outrage” (rape). It was “an attempt, mind you,” he noted. “This is a comprehensive term in the south. It embraces a wink by a colored man at a white girl half a mile off. Such a crime is worthy of lynching, but a beastly attack on a colored girl by a white man is only a wayward indiscretion.”71

  Still, Barnett took the precaution of investigating his new client before moving forward with her suit, telling Tourgée he wanted to be sure that there was no “indiscretion” in her past to undermine her potential case. After several inquiries with his Tennessee contacts, Barnett confirmed Wells’s good character “with many people from Memphis” and emerged “confident that Wells would be able to prove her case.”72 In the end, however, Barnett and Wells decided not to pursue the suit, fearing it might endanger Wells’s antilynching work. Lawyerly in his approach to her case, Barnett was also attentive to Wells’s larger political goals—as would also be the case in the closer relationship between Wells and Barnett that would blossom once they finally met. But in the spring of 1893, their rapport was still purely professional. All of Ida’s energies were now devoted to moving her antilynching campaign to Britain.

  Anti-Caste and Antilynching
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  Accordingly, April 5, 1893, found Wells aboard the Teutonic, a Liverpool-bound steamship. “First voyage across the ocean,” she noted in a little travel diary provided by the steamship. “Day is fine and trip so far enjoyable.” The journey, however, went rapidly downhill. Wells shared a cabin with Dr. Georgia E. L. Patton, a Meharry Medical School graduate whose final destination was a missionary post in Liberia. Wells had been happy to room with a doctor who could supply medical attention should she take ill on the voyage. But by day three she was reporting: “Seasick. So is Dr. Georgia E. L. Patton. We…lie in the two lower berths looking at each other. Ugh.” After six more days of “indigestion,” the ship finally reached Liverpool, where Wells saw her shipmate off on the final leg of her journey to Africa before traveling to Somerset to recuperate with Catherine Impey.73

  Though a stranger in a strange land, if Wells was ill at ease in her new environment she left no record of it. Instead, she told a reporter for The Sun (London) that being in Britain was like “being born again in a new condition. Everywhere I went I was received in perfect equality with ladies who did so much for me and my cause.” Prominent among them was her host Catherine Impey, who shared Wells’s activist sensibility.74 Devoted to temperance—a cause that Wells supported but did not spend much time on—Impey was a “life abstainer” and had been “the leading spirit of the British Women’s Temperance Association” until the late 1880s.75 After that, issues of race had compelled her to withdraw from both the BWTA and its parent organization the British Good Templar Order. In particular, Impey was appalled when the latter chose to reunite with the racially segregated United States Independent Order of Good Templars—the two organizations having previously split in a dispute over the presence of racially exclusive temperance organizations in the United States. The descendant of Quaker abolitionists, Impey had dedicated herself at an early age to working to “remove oppression among the darker races of the world” and was unwilling to be a member of an organization that had segregated American affiliates.76 So after trying and failing to block the reunification, Impey withdrew. She went on to organize a new temperance organization open to all, and in 1888 she also launched her anti-imperialist monthly, Anti-Caste.