by Mia Bay
Worse still was that Washington’s program ignored the pioneering work of such whites largely because he chose to speak to another class of whites. A revival of “the South’s old practice of slavery in a new dress,” Washington’s “gospel of work is not a new one to the Negro…It was the only education the South gave the Negro for the two centuries she had absolute control over his body and soul. The Negro knows that now, as then, the South is strongly opposed to his learning anything else but how to work.”61
Wells-Barnett’s article spoke to the concerns that Washington’s critics increasingly shared about the very future of the race under his leadership. The turn of the century saw the Tuskegee Institute grow richer and richer and its principal ever more powerful, at a time when whites were cutting back on all other education offered to African Americans, including grade school. His ideas were cited as the “inspiration” for the New Orleans school board’s decision to “cut the curriculum for Negro children down to the fifth grade,” and also had Mississippi’s governor advocating abolishing black public schools altogether in favor of “training blacks to perform manual labor.” Moreover, industrial education was Washington’s answer to everything, including problems that it could not solve, such as lynching—a subject on which “Mr. Washington says in substance: Give me money to educate the Negro and when he is taught how to work, he will not commit the crime for which lynching is done.” Such appeals were especially galling, since Ida believed that even Washington knew that “lynching is not invoked to punish crime but color.”62
While Wells-Barnett and Washington’s other critics had no objection to industrial education per se, they were horrified to see Washington fill Tuskegee’s coffers by offering it as the universal panacea for all the problems faced by the race. Industrial education could never take “the place of political, [civil]…and intellectual liberty,” Wells-Barnett told Washington, and African Americans were not willing to be “deprived of [the] fundamental rights of American citizenship to the end that one school for industrial training may flourish.”63
Though new leadership was desperately needed in the African American community, none such could be expected to emerge from the Afro-American Council or any other existing organization in which Booker T. Washington had supporters—as Du Bois found out when he tried to lead a challenge to Washington at a January 1904 New York meeting of black leaders assembled by millionaire Andrew Carnegie. Trotter was barred from the meeting altogether, and Du Bois’s attempt to create a committee of independent black leaders to address the race’s problems was soon so compromised by Bookerites that Du Bois felt forced to resign.64
After 1904, however, Du Bois and several other radicals began to organize against Washington in secret, calling together a quiet gathering of anti-Bookerites at Niagara Falls, New York, in the summer of 1905. Participants were invited to support an “organized, determined and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth.” They ended up staying in Fort Erie, Ontario—on the Canadian side of the falls—which was the only place Du Bois could find an affordable hotel willing to host a Negro conference. Fifty-nine men were invited, and twenty-nine came, creating a new national black organization, the Niagara Movement, dedicated to securing full citizenship rights for black people.
Women were not invited to join the organization until the following year, leaving Ida out, and Ferdinand Barnett was not included among the movement’s founders. Already a Republican appointee, Barnett would be nominated for a municipal judgeship by Chicago’s Republican Party later that summer. So he was in no position to participate in the potentially controversial meeting—if invited. As Barnett may well have suspected, his Republican support was already contested by the Tuskegee machine.65 But Barnett’s friend and fellow radical Dr. Charles E. Bentley was among the Niagara Movement’s organizers and later mobilized both Barnetts in support of the movement’s Illinois chapter, among the organization’s more successful branches. During its first year it managed to get an African American appointed to the new charter committee of Chicago—helping preserve the schoolchildren in Chicago from another attempt to segregate the schools there. In addition, the Illinois Niagara Movement members led a successful battle to ensure that the racist play The Clansman received no press, and supported Barnett’s run for municipal judge. By 1907, Ida was listed as a member.
Some of the founders of the Niagara Movement commemorated their 1905 meeting with a photo graph taken in front of the falls. W.E.B. Du Bois is among the men in the middle row, sitting second from the right.
Barnett’s judgeship would prove elusive. The Republican judicial slate swept the state elections in November 1906. Barnett, the only black candidate in the race, defeated his Democratic opponent by five hundred votes, although he received twenty thousand votes fewer than any of the other Republican candidates. The judgeship seemed to be his. But citing an “error in the police returns,” a few days later the election officials reversed the results, declaring Barnett to have lost by 304 votes, a margin that only increased after he demanded and received a recount.66 Understandably suspicious, Barnett charged “wholesale fraud,” claiming “the judges and clerks refused to count a large number of the ballots, but unlawfully, incorrectly and fraudulently marked them as defective”—an allegation that seems likely.67 Unpopular among whites in both parties, his election was particularly unpopular among members of the Illinois judiciary, who were not anxious to see a black man take the bench.68 In the end, the most appropriate assessment of the whole debacle came from Senator Tillman of South Carolina. A visitor to Chicago that fall, the white supremacist senator was amused by the contested election. South Carolina’s record on race relations might not be stellar, he chortled, but “we never yet have stooped to the infamy of electing a negro and then counting him out after the election.”69
Both Barnett’s defeat and Tillman’s comment came at a time when Wells-Barnett and other black reformers in Chicago had become increasingly frustrated in their attempts at creating enduring interracial alliances with white reformers such as Celia Parker Woolley, who was now heading up the Frederick Douglass Center. A mission very close to Wells-Barnett’s heart, the center was designed to be a place where “white and colored could meet and get to know each other better.”70 It opened in 1905 in a building located on Wabash Avenue, which was “then the dividing line between Negro and white neighborhoods.” Organized along the same lines as Jane Addams’s Hull House, it was designed to move middle-class reformers into impoverished urban communities to live and work among the people they hoped to reform (although the Douglass Center was located in a middle-class black community on the border of the black belt, at some remove from the slums that had begun to emerge in the heart of Chicago’s South Side).71 It offered South Side residents a variety of lectures and classes, as well as services such as a kindergarten, a summer day camp, and an athletic club. In addition, the center served as a meeting place for black women’s clubs and other community organizations.
Both Barnetts were among the volunteers who lectured and taught classes at the center, until it became clear to Ida that Celia Woolley assumed that whites would ultimately be in charge. Ida and other black women had raised much of the money needed to support the center, but once it was up and running, Woolley turned to other white women to supply the leadership for the club’s organizations. For example, when Woolley decided to organize a women’s club to support the center, she consulted Ida on how to set up its bylaws, but made it clear she “wanted a white woman” to lead the club.
Ida ignored the slight, but she grew still more disappointed with Woolley when she dragooned her into serving as the vice president of the club and asked her to organize the election of a white president whose summer vacation plans did not permit her to campaign for the job. Determined to support the Frederick Douglass Center, Ida continued to cooperate with Woolley for a time, but her distrust of the white reformer only grew. When Woolley publicly denigrated a lecture that Ida delivered
at the center on “What It Means to Be a Mother,” her remarks came as “a dash of cold water to Ida,” who lost all confidence in Woolley thereafter. “From that time on,” Wells-Barnett noted in her autobiography,
Mrs. Woolley never failed to give me this impression that she did not propose to give me much leeway in the affairs of the center…I felt at first that she had been influenced by other colored women who, strange to say, seemed so unwilling that one of their own race should occupy a position of influence, and although I was loath to accept it, I came to the conclusion before our relations ended that our white women friends were not willing to treat us on a plane of equality with themselves.72
Wells-Barnett’s conflicts with other reformers only grew more frequent over the course of her life. Often seen as a measure of her difficult personality, they should also be seen as a measure of a personality made more difficult by the racial and gender mores of her era. Not the only black Chicagoan to feel slighted by Celia Woolley, Ida struggled with the challenges of interracial cooperation when whites did not always respect their black collaborators. Woolley, for example, also alienated Julius Taylor, the editor of the black newspaper The Broad Ax (Chicago). Although supportive of the center, Taylor was troubled by Woolley’s condescending attitude toward the African Americans she sought to help, and even declared that Wells-Barnett should not have accepted the position as vice president that Woolley forced on her: “She is a lady of too much prominence to accept such a minor or unimportant position in any women’s club.”73
Wells-Barnett also proved too prominent to work with Mrs. Plummer—the Frederick Douglass Center Women’s Club president whose election she organized. In the fall of 1906, after a vicious antiblack riot in Atlanta resulted in the death of between ten and twenty-five African Americans, Mrs. Plummer was quick to embrace white accounts of the riot that described it as retribution for black sexual violence against white women. African Americans could prevent tragedies such as the Atlanta riot, she instructed a Douglass Center audience, by driving out “the criminals among you.” Ida was appalled, and told her so. Plummer bristled. Dismissing Wells-Barnett’s expertise on lynching, Mrs. Plummer told her “that every woman I know had told me that she is afraid to walk out after dark…your mouth is no more a prayer book than that of any other of my friends who have talked with me about this subject.”74
Wells-Barnett’s exchanges with Woolley and Plummer suggest that her strong personality was at odds with the demeanor demanded of a woman of her race in interracial settings. Neither Woolley nor Plummer expected to be criticized or challenged by a black woman. Ida’s temper, which she described as “always my besetting sin,” made it difficult for her to navigate her way through her conflicts with overbearing white reformers, even when she tried “to learn to take my friends as I found them”—as her more mild-mannered husband often advised. Ida took Ferdinand’s advice with reference to the Douglass Center and did her best to weather her conflicts with Woolley and Plummer. But the Douglass Center’s founder remained adamantly opposed to allowing Wells-Barnett any leadership role at the center—a position which soon put the two women at odds. In 1907, Wells-Barnett was nominated by the center’s women’s club to replace Plummer as president—after the other woman declined to run for a second term. When Woolley refused to support her nomination, Ida’s temper got the best of her. She “left the Douglass Center never to return.”75
“Under the Shadow of Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb”
Wells-Barnett’s affiliation with the NAACP was even shorter-lived. Founded in 1909, the NAACP opposed lynching with an energy previously equaled only by Wells-Barnett, and like her the organization used lynching “to draw attention to other racial inequities.” Moreover, Wells-Barnett loomed large in the events leading up to the founding of black America’s first enduring civil rights organization. The NAACP first took shape around the antilynching protests inspired by a race riot that took place in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14, 1908—on the Barnetts’ home turf. Although hardly Illinois’s first race riot, the Springfield riot made it clear that the race problem was no longer limited to the South. The hometown and burial place of Abraham Lincoln, Springfield would celebrate the centennial year of the Great Emancipator’s birth in February 1909, but that summer the town seemed poised to kill off the very people Lincoln had helped free. Moreover, whereas earlier race riots in Illinois had been prompted by labor strife in the state’s mining towns, the Southern bugaboo of alleged rape was at the center of the 1908 conflagration in the state capital.
Springfield’s growing black population had already come under scrutiny earlier that summer when a white mining engineer had died following a scuffle with a black man whom he found in his daughter’s bedroom. And then, on the morning of August 14, came the news that the white wife of a streetcar worker had charged a young black man with rape. With two black men charged for sexual assaults on white women in the town jail, a mob of angry whites began to assemble.76 That evening the mob found that both prisoners had already been spirited out of town by Springfield’s sheriff, who hoped to avoid any violence. However, the rowdy crowd only became more enraged and marched into town to attack Harry T. Loper, the white restaurant owner who had lent the sheriff his car to transport the prisoners. After destroying Loper’s cafe, the vigilantes moved on to lay waste to Springfield’s African American community.
The instigator was a middle-aged white woman named Kate Howard, who told the crowd of angry men swarming the jail, “Come on and I will show you how to do it. Women want protection and this seems to be the only way to get it.” The mob followed her lead, attacking the town’s black businesses and homes with shouts of “Curse the day that Lincoln freed the nigger” and “Niggers must depart from Springfield.”77 By the time five thousand Illinois National Guard troops restored order late the next day, ten people were dead and eighty injured. Most of Springfield’s black population had been driven out of town and the mob’s rampage had damaged more than $200,000 worth of property.
Among the first to condemn the riot were assistant state’s attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett and his wife, Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The couple, the Chicago Tribune noted, “expressed themselves forcibly regarding the Springfield uprising.”78 In the days that followed, the Barnetts’ protests were echoed by other concerned citizens across the North, both black and white.
Indeed, the Springfield riot became a cause célèbre among white reformers after it captured the imagination of William English Walling, a muckracking journalist who had just returned from czarist Russia, along with his wife, the Russian revolutionary Anna Strunsky. Both Walling and Strunsky had witnessed pogroms in Russia and attributed these murderous anti-Jewish riots to czarist tyranny, so they were shocked to see similar vicious race hatred on display in Lincoln’s hometown. In Chicago on the eve of the Springfield riot, they traveled to Springfield the next day to investigate and were horrified to find that Springfield whites were unrepentant. The son of a Kentucky slaveholder, Walling was a socialist who rejected his past and was troubled by the fact that many members of the mob hailed from the South. Kate Howard, the “notorious ‘Joan of Arc’” of the Springfield riot, had taken her inspiration from a recent visit to Texas and Arkansas, where she had “observed enviously that enforced separation of the races helped teach the negro where he belonged.” The Southern spirit of white supremacy was moving North, Walling concluded, where it threatened “American civilization” with “either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war.”79
Published as “The Race War in the North,” Walling’s anguished call to arms appeared in the liberal magazine The Independent. His broad-ranging critique of white racial violence echoed many of Wells-Barnett’s discussions of lynching. Indeed, Walling seems to have drawn on her work: his article even employed the kind of parenthetical grammatical commentary Wells-Barnett often featured in her antilynching pamphlets—such as bracketed question marks and exclamation points[!]. But whereas Wells-Barnet
t always had trouble mobilizing white reformers, Walling’s call to arms spurred several white reformers into action.
Among them was Mary White Ovington, a reformer and journalist, who then lived in a settlement house in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill district—a black neighborhood located in the area that now houses Lincoln Center. Keenly interested in race relations, and far more sympathetic to Du Bois than to Booker T. Washington, she shared Walling’s despair over the state of American race relations, and was excited by his challenge “to white and colored to battle, as the abolitionists had battled, for the full rights of the Negro.” She wrote to Walling, proposing an organization dedicated to that cause. Accordingly, the NAACP first took shape in Walling’s New York apartment, in a January 1909 meeting attended by Walling, Ovington, and Henry Moskowitz. The three envisioned a biracial organization dedicated to securing black civil rights, and set about enlisting national support. One of their first recruits was the New York journalist and publisher Oswald Garrison Villard. The son of the railroad magnate Henry Villard, Villard was the owner of both the New York Evening Post and The Nation. A descendant of reformers on his mother’s side, Villard was also the grandson of the renowned white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
Villard helped Walling draft a national “Call” to action. Signed by sixty-nine prominent reformers and published in the Post and The Nation on February 12, 1909, the centenary of Lincoln’s birthday, it challenged Americans to take “stock of the nation’s progress since 1865.”80
