To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Wells was profoundly impressed. “The American people had given him his opportunity for scoring its unfairness toward the Negro citizens and he did not fail to take advantage of it in the most fitting way.” Douglass’s talk, she believed, “had done more to bring our cause to the attention of the American people than anything else which happened during the fair.” Accordingly, she “went straight out to the fair and begged his pardon for presuming in my youth and inexperience to criticize him.” Douglass readily accepted her apology, and their friendship continued. But both his speech and their pamphlet would turn out to have a limited impact on public perceptions of the fair, which was widely reviewed as the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War. Even Douglass’s eloquence could not prevent cartoonists from lampooning Jubilee Day as “Darkies’ Day at the Fair,” and visitors took little notice of the pamphlet. The historian Hubert Bancroft, who wrote the massive Book of the Fair that came out at the end of 1893, did not even mention it and dismissed all dissent at the fair as utterly petty. “Among the visitors was a small but demonstrative contingent which seemed to have come to Chicago for no other purpose than to complain,” he wrote, “men and women to whom the colossal grandeur of a display contributed by all the nations of earth was as nothing compared with the imperfect cooking of a meal.”44

  Indeed, the only African American to make an enduring political mark at the fair may well have been Booker T. Washington, a conservative black educator who traveled to Chicago from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Still a relative unknown when he attended the fair’s International Labor Congress, the thirty-seven-year-old Tuskegee Institute principal offered a model of black leadership strikingly different from the uncompromising militancy favored by Douglass and Wells. A man whose career was built on cultivating the support of important whites, Washington approached them as a “deferential but dignified” leader intent on forging “a partnership with the Southern elite.”45

  A talented fund-raiser, Washington had built the Tuskegee Institute by promoting industrial education as the road to black advancement, and he offered a similar message to his audience at the Labor Congress. “When it comes to business pure and simple and to the exercise of skilled labor,” he proclaimed, “the South accords the black man almost the same rights as the white man.” Accordingly, African Americans should pursue industrial work and economic power rather than political rights to advance their race. “Friction between the races” would “pass away as the black man gets a hold of the things the white man wants and respects, like the trades and mechanic arts. It is along these lines we are to find the solution to all these problems in the South.” Wells and Douglass, who also participated in the Labor Congress, both objected vehemently—with Wells noting that most Southern blacks were landless sharecroppers “who were never allowed to get out of debt” or leave the fields. But Washington’s politically accommodationist message appealed to other members of his largely white audience—who commended him to Atlanta’s civic leaders as a potential speaker at an upcoming world’s fair in Atlanta in 1895. There, Washington would become the first African American to deliver a world’s fair opening day address, offering a similar message of racial reconciliation in his now famous “Atlanta Compromise Speech.”46

  Washington’s meteoric rise to fame after his appearance in Atlanta gave his message a far more immediate impact on American race relations than did Wells’s and Douglass’s protests in Chicago. But the months Wells spent at the 1893 fair were not totally wasted. She got to know and like Chicago, and decided to remain there instead of returning to New York City.

  The Tennessee exile evidently felt at home among the growing population of black Southern migrants that populated Chicago. Like Wells, more than 40 percent of them hailed from the upper South, mainly Tennessee and Kentucky, and they tended to be “more urban, militant and literate than those who remained in the South.” Moreover, as Wells discovered when she sought support for her pamphlet, the city had a sizable and progressive black middle class that supported several churches. And it was also home to Ferdinand Barnett’s Conservator, which offered Wells a job that may well have seemed more secure than her post at the Age—which had recently shrunk from an eight-page paper to a four-page.47

  Most important, perhaps, Chicago also had Barnett himself, who provided Wells with the most compelling reason of all to resettle there. Wells’s autobiography discloses virtually nothing about how or when their professional relationship became personal, but by the beginning of 1894 Barnett had offered Wells “a home of my own” in Chicago.48 Their courtship was swift. Despite their similar career paths and their legal correspondence during 1892–93, the two do not seem to have met until Wells came to Chicago to work on The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Once they did meet, however, Wells and Barnett clearly found out they had much in common. At forty, Barnett was ten years older than Wells and far “more easygoing.” But he nonetheless shared the fiery young woman’s “outspoken and militant” approach to politics. “Once he was threatened with jail because he said in a speech that the American flag was a dirty rag if it didn’t protect its citizens,” his daughter Alfreda Duster observed, remembering her parents’ similarly passionate approach to political issues.49

  A widower with two young sons, Barnett had lost his wife, Mary Graham Barnett, in 1888, when she died suddenly of a heart attack after only five years of marriage. On his own after that, Barnett was described by one of his contemporaries as a “tall, handsome man” who sometimes wore a Prince Albert coat and a silk hat, “making him the picture (to me) of what a real prince or a king should look.” Despite his fine looks and the many “women chasing him while he was a widower,” Barnett rarely dated after his wife’s death. Although not opposed to remarriage, he had resolved not to marry again until he found someone “meaningful to his life and career.” But when he decided Ida “fit that pattern,” he did not hesitate to pursue her and marry her. In her early thirties when they met, Wells must have seemed to be a perfect partner: Barnett proposed less than six months after she arrived in Chicago.

  Ferdinand Lee Barnett, c. 1890

  Wells proved receptive. Long worried that she would never get married, Ida seems to have been more than happy to meet the highly eligible widower. They got to know each other while working on the pamphlet and were compatible from the outset. Barnett was “always very supportive of whatever she [Wells] got into,” while Wells “was always out there scrapping for him.” The pair also had good friends in common, such as Albion Tourgée and Frederick Douglass—who one reporter later insisted engineered the Wells-Barnett union.50 If so, his role cannot have been strenuous. Between the couple’s first meeting and their marriage nearly two years later, their relationship had time to blossom—albeit at a distance. Wells would travel back to England in the winter of 1894, leaving Barnett behind.

  But his prominence in her thoughts can be seen in one of her publications from that period. Published in The A.M.E. Zion Quarterly at the beginning of the year, “Two Christmas Days: A Holiday Story” is Wells’s only work of romance. A preachy short story about a former teacher who falls in love with a lawyer, it reaffirms that journalism rather than fiction was Wells’s métier. Not particularly compelling, “Two Christmas Days” has only one male protagonist and not much action. But its contents show Wells drawing favorable romantic contrasts between Barnett and previous suitors. A story of love found, lost, and then found again, it features a hero who proves himself by overcoming faults that Wells had encountered in previous suitors—some of whom lacked ambition and discipline. Reformed by love, her fictional hero becomes a hardworking teetotaler—much like Ferdinand Barnett, who was known for not allowing liquor in his home.51

  Ida had finally found a man she could respect and trust, the story suggests, as does her relationship with Barnett, which continued apace even after she left Chicago. His proposal came sometime before she left, and during her trip the couple susta
ined a “long distance correspondence courtship.” Barnett wooed Wells by writing her letters that met her at every stop on her busy second trip to Britain—and left a lifelong impression. The couple’s correspondence does not survive, but Ida often talked about it to her daughter Alfreda, telling her that her “father could write a beautiful love letter.” Likewise, Wells herself was a lively and expressive correspondent. So a prolific exchange of letters no doubt helped cement the bond between the two.52

  Indeed, Wells may have had little time for a more direct courtship during her months in Chicago. With ten thousand pamphlets to distribute, the late summer and fall months saw her spending long hours at the Haitian pavilion right through to the fair’s end in October. That fall, she also took on the task of organizing the first black women’s club in Illinois. Invited to lecture on “Ladies Day” at a black men’s organization named the Tourgée Club in Chicago, Wells advised the female audience to start a club of their own. An enthusiastic, if recent, convert to women’s organizations, Wells “told them of the club movement in the East and how women’s gatherings in England were very important to the womanhood of that nation.”53 She even went so far as to offer to organize weekly meetings at the Tourgée Club. By September, the Chicago women’s club was established, and by the time Wells left for England it had over three hundred members and was still growing.

  In the midst of all her other activities and her romance with Barnett, Wells’s commitment to antilynching remained urgent. Her English trip had garnered her continuing attention in the white American press, as well as her first commission to write for a white newspaper. That summer, the Daily Inter Ocean, a progressive Chicago newspaper that also employed Wells’s friend and fellow foe of mob violence Albion Tourgée, hired Wells to investigate the lynching of C. J. Miller.

  An African American man from Springfield, Illinois, Miller was put to death on July 7, 1893, in Bardwell, Kentucky—a small town near Kentucky’s Missouri border. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Miller had been traveling through Missouri looking for work when nine-year-old Ruby Ray and her nineteen-year-old sister Mary were found murdered near Bardwell. A fisherman who later realized that he might have ferried the likely criminal across the Mississippi River shortly after the crime took place came forward to describe the killer as either “a white man or a very bright mulatto.” But this description did not prevent the sheriff in the nearby town of Sikeston, Missouri, from picking up the dark-skinned C. J. Miller as he attempted to hop a freight train. Held in Sikeston without a warrant, Miller maintained “he had never been in Kentucky in all his life.”54 The sheriff ignored his protests, delivering him directly to a train full of beer-drinking whites from Kentucky, who took him to Bardwell, after first trying and failing to confirm his identity with the fisherman. Once in Kentucky, Miller was placed on a platform built by the mob to receive the killer.

  Captioned “After the Lynching,” this drawing illustrated Wells’s Daily Inter Ocean account of the C. J. Miller lynching. The graphically brutal and potentially controversial image was followed by a parenthetical note that read: “The editor apologizes for using this reproduction of a photograph taken at Bardwell, Ky., just before the body of the negro Miller was burned. But in no other way is it possible to give an adequate idea of the inhumanity of the case. Not the least distressing feature is that (as will be seen by the picture) there were so many young people among the witnesses of an act of brutality and savagery.”

  Stunned by this turn of events, Miller appealed to the crowd, reiterating that he had committed no crime and had not been in Kentucky when the murders took place. With no evidence linking the Illinois man to the crime, even the father of the two dead girls questioned Miller’s guilt. “I thought that a whiter man had committed the crime,” he told the crowd as they made a fruitless attempt to force Miller to confess, but “the mob refused to listen to reason.” The whites who gathered in Bardwell “had spent the day anticipating a lynching,” Ida reported, “and proof or no proof they did not intend to go home without a lynching bee.” While local officials were still at work confirming Miller’s account of his whereabouts—which turned out to be true—Miller was strung up from a telegraph pole and hung. His body was then mutilated and burned. He escaped death by fire, Wells noted with horror, only because “the mob decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and hang instead of burn him, as was first intended.”55

  Wells returned to Chicago and published her illustrated account of Miller’s death only to receive an equally horrifying telegram headlined JULY 22, MEMPHIS, THE PUBLIC LEDGER. It read, “Lee Walker, colored man, accused of raping white women, in jail here will be taken out and burned by whites to-night. Can you send Miss Ida B. Wells to write it up? Answer. R. M. Martin, with The Public Ledger.” A cruel and mocking message from one of Wells’s many enemies in Memphis, this missive was dispatched one day before Walker was dragged out of jail and murdered. Too bloodthirsty to even take their prisoner to the center of town to lynch him on Main Street, as planned, the Memphis mob hanged Walker from a telegraph pole just a few blocks away from his jail cell. After he was dead they cut him down, burned his body, and dragged his charred corpse to the town’s central thoroughfare before stringing his remains up once more, this time to display him in front of the city’s courthouse. There the crowd that had collected to watch his death broke the dead man’s teeth and cut the fingernails off his body to take home “as souvenirs.”56

  Appalled, Wells included the telegram and a press clipping from The Public Ledger (Memphis) reporting the grisly story of Lee Walker’s death along with her illustrated account of the C. J. Miller lynching in The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. She also wrote of Walker’s lynching in the Daily Inter Ocean. But the Ledger’s telegram to Wells signaled to her the power and limitations of her newfound celebrity. She had become well enough known to figure prominently in the national debate about lynching—and attract personal missives from the lynchers themselves. Yet she could not prevent Lee Walker’s death or shield other victims of mob violence. As she wrote in 1894, she could only make the American people “objects of the gaze of the civilized world”; she could only strive to ensure “that for every lynching humanity asks that America render its account to civilization and itself.”57 And by early 1895, this conviction made her leave behind her new job, new friends, and new romantic prospect in Chicago to return to England.

  Wells’s Second British Tour

  The Society for the Recognition of the Universal Brotherhood of Man (SRUBM), the antiracist organization that had taken shape around Wells’s visit to Britain, had continued after her departure. Catherine Impey was “practically retired” as a result of Isabelle Mayo’s continuing hostility. But Mayo still headed up the organization’s Scottish branches and had enlisted Celestine Edwards, a black man from the British West Indian island of Dominica, to replace Impey as the leader of the English SRUBM. She also appointed Edwards to edit the organization’s new official publication, Fraternity—which replaced Impey’s Anti-Caste. In September, Edwards moved to pick up Wells’s antilynching campaign, with Mayo’s enthusiastic support. “Mr. Edwards’ arrangements would do you justice,” Mayo wrote Wells, relaying the invitation for a second tour, “and you could work unblighted!!”58

  Wells welcomed the invitation as another “opportunity to spread the truth,” even though it meant securing a leave of absence at her new job and dealing with the often difficult Mayo. More cautious this time, Wells negotiated the terms of her visit in advance, asking for “expenses & 2 pound per week—as it was as little as I could come for that at a sacrifice to my business.” Moreover, she even negotiated the matter of Impey herself, after receiving a letter from Mayo pressing her to publicly denounce Impey on her return visit. As before, Wells refused, telling Mayo that she “couldn’t come…if expected to say anything about Miss I.—for I would not be a party to further exposure of her weakness.”59 When Mayo proved dissatisfied with Wells�
�s answer, Edwards stepped in to resolve the dispute, reiterating SRUBM’s invitation and assuring Wells that Mayo did not speak on behalf of the organization, which was impatiently awaiting her visit.

  Heartened by his support, Wells set sail for England in early 1894. Originally planned for January, her departure was delayed by poor weather, so she did not arrive until March. By then, she must have rued her decision to return. She landed only to find that Mayo had resigned from the SRUBM rather than support Wells’s tour. Worse still, the Scottish writer had withdrawn the funds she had guaranteed to cover Wells’s expenses. Meanwhile, the SRUBM’s support had all but collapsed as well. Edwards, who was scheduled to manage and fund the English leg of Wells’s trip with the help of SRUBM’s membership, was gravely ill, leaving the organization in disarray. Laid low by a case of influenza that would eventually kill him, Edwards would soon return to his childhood home on Dominica in hopes of recovering his health.