by Mia Bay
Equally amenable to such practices was Frances Willard, the immensely popular leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Although she hailed from an old Massachusetts family with abolitionist leanings, Willard was an apostle of reconciliation between the North and South. Indeed, she rose to the leadership of the largest women’s organization in the United States on the slogan “No North, No South, No Sex, No Sectionalism in Politics.” A suffrage slogan, it reflected Willard’s commitment to securing women the vote, a cause that she incorporated in the WCTU’s platform when she became its president in 1879. Her organization pursued both suffrage and temperance, but largely along racial lines designed to accommodate their white Southern members. Many branches of the organization were segregated, and, as historian Edward Blum notes, “the WCTU generally remained silent regarding racial violence.” In addition, WCTU leaders “nourished disenfranchisement by actively arguing on its behalf.” Not surprisingly, as a result, the WCTU held limited appeal among African American women, many of whom rejected its segregationist policies and its “antipathy toward the cause of race justice.”82
Wells targeted Moody and Willard, however, not because of the specifics of their careers, but because both were well-known figures who had become frequent subjects of discussion on her British tours. On her first trip, when Wells had told British audiences that white religious leaders remained silent on the topic of lynching, they often asked, but “what about Rev. D. L. Moody and Miss Frances Willard?” And in reply, Wells had answered that, as far as she knew, Moody and Willard had never challenged lynching or Jim Crow. She could remember notices of Moody’s revival sermons during her Memphis days “that said Negroes who wished to attend his meetings would have to go into a gallery or that a special service would be set aside for colored people.” And likewise, she read an 1890 interview with Willard published by The Sun (New York) in which Willard had “all but condoned lynching.”83
On her return trip, Wells was still fielding the same questions, this time from critics who refused to believe her. Wells chose to discuss Willard and Moody in Fraternity, which also reprinted Willard’s interview from The Voice (New York). Her article took particular aim at Willard, since Moody’s support of segregated congregations paled next to the opinions Willard had expressed in her interview. In it, Willard supported the disenfranchisement of black men and also deplored the dangers that they posed to white women. “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt,” she had told The Voice. “The grog shop is its centre of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.”84
Willard had been under fire in the black press since her Sun interview—with little apparent effect. Willard bemoaned the WCTU’s lack of success building a large colored constituency, but often in racist terms unlikely to attract black members. If anything, she was even more tolerant of lynching than Wells accused her of being. Willard told a February 1893 national meeting of the WCTU that she was eager to organize the colored people in the organization, particularly now that “a lurid vengeance has devoured the devourers of women and children.” Willard’s remarks underscored her unshakable conviction that interracial sex was the cause of lynching, as well as her belief that “an average colored man is loyal to the purity of white women; but when under the influence of intoxicating liquors the tendency of all men is toward a loss of self control, and the ignorant and vicious, whether white or black, are the most dangerous characters.”85
Yet Willard’s views did not make her an easy target. She was immediately defended by Lady Henry Somerset, who published a flattering interview with Willard on May 21, 1894, in The Westminster Gazette. A close friend of Willard’s, Somerset hosted her at her Reigate Estate, just outside of London, during much of 1893 and 1894. The two women answered Wells’s charges by sitting down in Somerset’s garden for a cozy exchange that underscored Willard’s antislavery lineage. “Your family for generations back were all Abolitionists,” Somerset said to Willard, suggesting any charge that the American leader did not support racial justice had to be absurd. “Your father and mother were educated in the famous Abolition College, founded by the Congregationalists in Oberlin, Ohio.” But when their discussion moved to the present day, Willard revealed how far removed she was from her family’s abolitionist past by disavowing the idea that a Northerner such as herself could have any influence on Southern matters. “State rights prevail with us,” she told Somerset, “and prevent action by the National Government.” Talking to a Northern woman such as herself about lynching “is really much the same as though London had been held responsible for atrocities in Bulgaria.” Willard also insisted that “neither by voice nor pen have I ever condoned, much less defended, any injustice toward the coloured people.”86
This careful disclaimer aside, however, Willard had no real defense against most of Wells’s charges. Largely in agreement with the racist views held by many of the WCTU’s white Southern members, she was not willing to denounce disenfranchisement—or even lynching. Instead, she explained that her opposition to black voting arose from her belief that the franchise should be limited to the educated and should never have been expanded to include “alien illiterates” such as immigrants or blacks. Politics had no place for “the plantation Negro who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule.” And when it came to lynching, Willard stood by her claim that black men menaced the safety of women and children in “a thousand localities,” adding: “I had been told by the best people I knew in the South—and I knew a great many ministers, editors, and home people…If this be not true, then the well-nigh universal testimony of white people in the South is unworthy of credence.”87
Quick to capitalize on Willard’s weak rejoinder, Wells responded by noting the simultaneously defensive and self-satisfied tone that marked Willard’s interview with Somerset. “The interview published in your columns to-day hardly merits a reply, because of the indifference to suffering manifested,” Wells wrote in a letter that The Westminster Gazette published the next day:
Two ladies are represented sitting under a tree at Reigate, and, after some preliminary remarks on the terrible subject of lynching, Miss Willard laughingly replies by cracking a joke. And the concluding sentence of the interview shows the object is not to determine how best they may help the negro who is being hanged, shot, and burned, but “to guard Miss Willard’s reputation.”
Wells’s answer was effective in the short run. The British papers sided with her against the “two prominent white women” who seemed to have “joined hands in an effort to crush an insignificant colored woman.”88 Somerset’s close friendship with Willard undercut the effectiveness of her defense of Willard, and Wells’s British friends rallied around her, organizing a breakfast in her honor with sixteen members of Parliament.
Subsequently invited to dinner at the House of Commons by William Woodall, a Liberal member of Parliament, Wells spent her last days in London in a triumphant round of parties and meetings with British reformers. On the last night of her stay came the final victory. On the eve of her departure, Wells’s English friends and supporters founded an organization called the British Anti-Lynching Committee. Designed to carry on her work after her departure, it was made up of a diverse coalition of reformers, whose ranks included twenty Liberal members of Parliament as well as several members of the British nobility. Led by the Duke of Argyll, it would investigate “lynching and mob outrages in America,” with the aim of giving “expression to public opinion in condemnation of such outrages in whatever way may seem best calculated to assist the cause of humanity and civilization.”89
Wells left Britain having made a lasting impact. Over the next year and a half the Anti-Lynching Committee would send letters of protest to the governors of all the Southern states, while also flooding those officials with more than two thousand newspaper
s, petitions, and other documents containing antilynching material. It also corresponded with black editors across the South gathering information on lynching, and at one point planned to send a subcommittee to the United States to investigate further—a proposal that was greeted with howls of outrage from American politicians in both the North and South. In the end, only one member visited, but the committee had made its point. Far more prominently placed than Wells, the British Anti-Lynching Committee would exert enough pressure on American state leaders to ensure that the impact of Wells’s British antilynching campaign outlived her visits there and gave her cause an unprecedented new visibility at home.
After three months and 102 public appearances in Britain, Wells brought her antilynching campaign back home. While her British backers were anxious to see her “follow up the advantage which their moral support had given,” Wells was utterly exhausted. In desperate need of rest, she booked the most leisurely and roundabout voyage to the United States she could find, traveling to Canada via the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then taking a train to New York. She may also have been in no hurry to return to her native land or travel with other Americans on an ocean liner bound for the United States, having had “many a set-to with the ubiquitous Americans living abroad.”90
“Home, did I say?” she had written Helen Pitts Douglass in April 1894, after supplying Douglass with the date of her passage home from Britain: “I forgot that I have no home.” On the road for over two years, and more welcome in Britain than in the United States, Wells had come to question whether any African American could claim to be at home “in the land of the free and home of the brave.”91 But soon Wells would prove herself wrong by making an enduring home for herself with her faithful correspondent Ferdinand Barnett, who was waiting for her in Chicago.
6
“Although a Busy Woman, She Has Found the Time to Marry”
IN OUTLINING THE STORY OF HER MOTHER’S LIFE, ALFREDA Duster described the years that followed Wells’s second British tour with a string of terms that captured the activist character of her parents’ union: “Marriage—Family—and continued Work against Lynching.” Wells would marry in 1895 and thereafter give birth to four children, whose arrivals slowed rather than stilled her antilynching campaign. Committed to eradicating lynching and promoting black civil rights, she struggled to balance her political activism with the demands of motherhood—which she found to be a “profession by itself, just like lecturing or teaching.”1 Her domestic responsibilities made her different from any male black leader of her generation and made it difficult for her to sustain her place on the national scene—or build an enduring following. Although the best-known black female leader of her day, Wells would never become the heir to Frederick Douglass—as some of her supporters had once predicted. Married in the spring of 1895, she had her first child a year later, and thereafter juggled her activism with domestic responsibilities that kept her closer to home.
Motherhood, however, was not the only issue limiting Wells’s future prospects as a leader. Gender made Wells an unlikely successor to Douglass in an era when men predominated not just in politics, but in all organizations and movements. In making her mark as an antilynching activist, Wells had challenged conventional assumptions about male leadership, inspiring contemporaries to brand her “our noble Joanna of Arc”—after the teenage warrior who led French armies to victory in the fifteenth century.2 Remembered for cutting her hair, donning armor, and mastering the martial arts, Joan of Arc was as much an icon of gender transgression as she was of female leadership—a point the Wells–Joan of Arc comparison underscored. Moreover, the comparison invoked a transitory moment of female leadership, which in Joan’s case ended up with a heresy conviction and death at the hands of her enemies. Especially within the context of nineteenth-century gender conventions, the French leader was remembered as a saintly martyr who gave her life to liberate her people rather than as an example of a woman who could lead men. So images of Wells as a modern-day Joan of Arc likewise presented Wells as a persecuted figure whose leadership would be brief and who posed no permanent challenge to male leadership.
Wells would escape any heresy trial, but both her marriage and the public furor that greeted her when she returned from her second British tour must have helped cement the image of her leadership as a fleeting aberration. Moreover, when Douglass died not long after she returned from her second British trip, Wells was in no position to fill his shoes. Her second British tour was a resounding success, insofar as it subjected lynching to new scrutiny in the United States. It fostered antilynching bills, Congressional debate, and Southern embarrassment, all of which combined to promote the passage of antilynching laws in several states, and scrutiny of the practice throughout the nation. But the success of Wells’s antilynching campaign did not win her the support of American whites. Instead, she returned home from England as notorious as she was famous, and continued to be discussed in derisive terms even in Northern publications such as The New York Times. Influential without ever being popular, Wells correctly read articles defaming her as a “negro adventuress” as evidence that “the work had done great good.”3 As she recognized, abuse from The Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis), The Atlanta Constitution, The Telegraph (Macon, Ga.), and The Washington Post indicated that she was receiving attention from people who once had ignored both Wells and lynching, but now felt compelled to acknowledge both.
Widespread white hostility, however, would also ensure that Wells would never succeed Douglass. Instead, she would remain a persecuted Joan figure, even after Douglass died early in 1895, leaving black America with no obvious successor. A variety of regional leaders represented the race, and Wells was well-known enough to be vilified in the national press, but no post-emancipation black leader had emerged who could match Douglass’s national recognition, popularity, or authority. Part of the problem was that the late nineteenth century was not an auspicious time for black leaders. Violence took the lives of some of the leading black political leaders of the post-emancipation era, while the elimination of the black vote through much of the South during the 1880s and 1890s effectively eradicated electoral politics as a continuing source of black leadership. Moreover, independent and uncompromising black leaders such as Douglass did not, and indeed could not, flourish in the Jim Crow South, which further compromised any prospects for the emergence of a black leader with a national following. In 1895 more than 90 percent of black people still lived in the South, but even Southern-born “Afro-American agitators,” such as Ida B. Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, generally ended up moving north.
Most politically effective as an agitator rather than as an established race leader, Wells remained an agitator all her life. In 1895, with her antilynching campaign still going strong, Wells did not jockey to replace Douglass. Instead, she continued to focus on using her formidable skills as an orator and journalist to combat lynching, and worked to build an antilynching coalition that depended on international rather than national leadership. No real Joan of Arc either, Wells never embraced the role of martyr—despite the storm of criticism she received. Instead, she welcomed support from other black women, who once again spoke up in her defense. In 1895, when Wells’s antilynching campaign was vilified by a Missouri editor who slandered both Wells and black women as a group, a national organization of black women’s clubs was formed to rebuff such assaults. An agitator even among her allies, Wells would not always see eye to eye even with her female defenders. But she was heartened to see her work inspire a new sense of activism among black women even as she entered into a marriage and family life that would test her own ability to remain fully committed to such work.
“Practical Negro Advancement”
Possibly most problematic for Wells’s antilynching campaign in the long run was not her marriage or family life, but rather the black leader whom many whites anointed as Douglass’s successor. An accommodationist rather than an agitator, Booker T. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Tus
kegee, Alabama, would quickly bypass other potential leaders in the mid-1890s to replace Douglass as the leading voice of his race. A Southerner, Washington rose to national prominence on claims that he spoke for the blacks of his region. A man whose career took shape within the political constraints of the Jim Crow South, Washington recognized that whites rather than blacks were his most crucial constituency, and crafted a folksy and nonconfrontational leadership style that brought him widespread national recognition and support among whites. Whereas the African American activists T. Thomas Fortune and Wells—and Douglass himself—had provided post-emancipation black America with a moral leadership that challenged racial injustice, the Alabama educator advocated a program of black economic development tailored to fit the Jim Crow regime.
In the spring of 1894, while Wells was in Britain protesting lynching, Washington proposed a far more conciliatory approach. “Practical Negro Advancement,” he told a black audience in Washington, D.C., would not come from “stump speeches” or black political agitation (in what may have been a veiled dig at Wells). Instead, the accumulation of wealth by African Americans would bring with it the “rights, political and otherwise, to which they are entitled. The accumulation of property would not only earn blacks the right to vote, Washington maintained, it would give them the power to end lynching. If “ten colored businessmen in any of the small towns in the South, whose aggregate deposits in the leading bank of the town amount to $100,000…heard that some colored man was going to be lynched one night,” Washington maintained, they could prevent mob violence by going to the president of the bank and threatening to withdraw their deposits the next day. No “lynching would occur that night…nor any other night. The president and directors of the bank don’t propose to have it weakened and perhaps ruined simply to gratify the thirst of a mob for blood.”4
