by Mia Bay
Wells-Barnett was among the signers of “The Call,” and one of the three black speakers at the National Negro Conference meeting held in New York that spring to establish the new organization. In a speech titled “Lynching, Our National Crime,” Wells-Barnett presented a succinct history of lynching. “First: Lynching is color line murder. Second: Crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third: It is a national crime that requires a national remedy.” She called for federal action and the establishment of “a bureau for the investigation and publication of the details of every lynching.”81 The NAACP would take on lynching as one of its major issues in its early years—following Ida’s proposed program almost to the letter.82 But Wells-Barnett would find no role in the organization.
An interracial gathering of white reformers and Niagara Movement activists, the three hundred men and women who assembled in New York’s Charity Hall that spring cobbled together an alliance sustained by compromises on both sides of the color line—and effectively excluded the uncompromising leadership of figures such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and William Monroe Trotter. Many of the white reformers who attended the meeting had followed the Negro problem largely through the speeches and writings of Booker T. Washington and “expected to meet a belated people who would arouse their pity.”83 Instead, they encountered a group of opinionated and accomplished black radicals, who were adamantly opposed to the white reformers’ plans for enlisting Booker T. Washington’s support. One black woman—probably Wells-Barnett—rejected such proposals with an “almost tearful earnestness born of bitter experience—‘They are betraying us once again—our white friends.’” Washington himself had declined Oswald Garrison Villard’s invitation to attend the meeting, and also discouraged his supporters from attending, leaving the floor to his opponents. He was more interested, he told Villard, in “progressive, constructive work” than “agitation and criticism.”84
Still, the absent Washington hovered over the meeting “like Banquo’s ghost,” as Wells-Barnett later recalled.85 His leadership offered a conservative alternative to the more radical path advocated by most of the African Americans attending. Convinced that the fledgling organization needed Washington’s endorsement to survive, Villard was anxious to establish an agenda that Washington would not oppose—with or without the support of other blacks at the meeting. “If you want to raise money for anything for the Negro in New York, you must have Washington’s backing,” he maintained. Wealthy and well connected, Villard spent enough time in elite circles to be well aware of Washington’s close ties to powerful industrialists; far less familiar with America’s black leadership, he was surprised and annoyed to find “the whole colored crowd” who attended the meeting “bitterly anti-Washington.”
Shortly after midnight, the conference’s final session appointed a forty-person steering committee, made up of a carefully chosen list of people whose selection, according to Mary White Ovington, “suited nobody.” But it did allow the National Negro Conference—which changed its name to the NAACP in 1910—to begin its inaugural year. Booker T. Washington was left off the organization’s steering committee, as were black “extremists” such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and William Monroe Trotter. Dominated by whites, the Committee of Forty included only a few black leaders: “middle-of-the-roaders” such as Mary Church Terrell, and the anti-Washingtonian W.E.B. Du Bois, who had been a diplomatic presence at a meeting only “somewhat less noisy than bedlam.”86
Among those unsatisfied with the new organization’s leadership was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who was stunned to find herself omitted from the committee charged with designing the program and structure of the new organization. Her name had been on the original list submitted to the nominating committee appointed to select the group and she had thought she had the support of W.E.B. Du Bois—the nominating subcommittee’s sole black member. So when her name was not read during the meeting’s final session, Ida got up and left the meeting. She was prepared “to put the best possible face on the matter,” she said in her autobiography, but she seems to have left in a characteristic fit of temper. As she left, other participants in the meeting were still contesting her omission from the Committee of Forty, and she was soon called back into the building as a result. But even after nominating-committee chair Charles Edward Russell “illegally” added Wells-Barnett to the Committee of Forty shortly after the meeting ended, the damage was done.
Wells-Barnett returned from the National Negro Conference meeting feeling betrayed by Du Bois, who had taken her name off the leadership committee so he could add that of Niagara Movement activist Charles Bentley—and better represent that organization. Du Bois also believed that Wells-Barnett was not crucial to the Committee of Forty—and was indiscreet enough to say as much to her. “I knew that you and Mr. Barnett were represented by Celia Woolley at the Douglass Center and that you would be represented through her,” he told Wells-Barnett after the meeting.87 This explanation no doubt only added to Ida’s bitter feeling against Du Bois. By 1909, she was no longer affiliated with the Douglass Center, and she had little reason to trust Woolley to represent the interests of black women (although Woolley was among those who lobbied to see Wells-Barnett added to the committee).
Indeed, Wells-Barnett’s experiences with the white women at the Douglass Center may explain why she left the National Negro Conference meeting more resentful of New York reformer Mary White Ovington than she was of Du Bois. In Crusade for Justice Wells-Barnett recalled that shortly after she made her precipitous first exit from Charity Hall, “Miss Mary Ovington, who had taken a very active part in the deliberations, swept by me with an air of triumph and a very pleased look on her face.” Ovington was none too enthusiastic about Wells-Barnett’s leadership: she would later characterize Ida and other black radicals as “fitted for courageous work, but perhaps not fitted for the restraints of organization.” In turn, Wells-Barnett saw Ovington, who would go on to serve the NAACP as executive secretary, board member, and for a time chairman, as a woman who was largely indifferent to the problems faced by black women. A fervent admirer of Du Bois, Ovington “basked in the sunlight of the adoration of the few collegebred Negroes who have surrounded her,” Wells-Barnett noted with rancor. “But [she] has made little effort to know the soul of the black woman; and to that extent has fallen short of helping a race which has suffered as no white woman has ever been called upon to suffer or understand.”88
However, neither Ovington nor Du Bois was responsible for the omission of black radicals such as Wells-Barnett and William Monroe Trotter from the Committee of Forty. It was Villard. Still hoping for Washington’s endorsement, Villard had made sure that most of his detractors were excluded from the committee. “It is not to be a Washington movement, or a Du Bois movement,” he had assured Washington, even before the meeting began. Likewise, he later admitted to Ovington that “the whole meeting was rigged up in advance—which it naturally had to be.”89
A powerful man with little patience for grassroots leadership, Villard found the opinionated black radicals at the meeting “trying” and “was unreceptive to having more than a few African-Americans on the Committee of Forty.” Married to a Georgia-born wife who “insisted that her husband invited neither black people or Jews to their home,” Villard expected African Americans “to be humble and thankful or certainly not assertive and aggressive.”90 He cannot have enjoyed Wells-Barnett’s behavior at the meeting. Indeed, during its early years even Du Bois’s status in the organization was precarious. But Du Bois had the support of energetic white progressives such as Ovington and Walling, who viewed the accomplished African American professor as indispensable to the organization both “as organizer and as symbol.”91
No such arguments could be made on behalf of Wells-Barnett. While “long time friends of the Negro” such as white progressive John Milholland admired Wells-Barnett for her many years of antilynching work, some of the other young reformers who attended the meeting scarcely knew who she was. Her antilynching campaig
n had never reached them, and by the end of the century’s first decade, Wells-Barnett’s credentials for race leadership were becoming increasingly outmoded. She lacked the illustrious education of a Du Bois and the powerful institutional base of a Washington—and she was a wife and a mother in an age when few prominent professional women had domestic responsibilities. In the end, it is hard to know which of her handicaps was most decisive. But together they ensured that Ida B. Wells-Barnett no longer loomed large in discussions of the race’s most prominent leaders.
In some ways, the shift was a measure of the changing times in which she lived. Nineteenth-century black America had had more room for leaders such as Wells-Barnett. Slavery had created a generation of leaders such as her mentor Frederick Douglass, who educated themselves and whose major credentials for leadership lay largely in their personal experience and charisma. Among them were women as well as men—most notably Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. But by the early twentieth century, the slave society that had given birth to such leaders was gone forever, and the possibilities for black leadership were increasingly limited to a more conventional range of individuals. Not unlike the white leaders of their era, the black professionals who inaugurated the Niagara Movement were educated men who rarely thought to include women in their race’s leadership class. Women were only admitted into the Niagara Movement as an afterthought, and the movement’s leaders subscribed to a gendered understanding of leadership that erased the ways in which Wells-Barnett’s antilynching campaign had reshaped the agenda of black radicalism during the 1890s.
Meanwhile, the biracial coalition that cobbled together the NAACP had even less room for black female leaders such as Wells-Barnett. Conservative members of the Committee of Forty such as Villard would have preferred to leave the organization’s policy decisions “to a coterie of distinguished white men.” But when the group reconvened in New York in 1910 to establish its permanent organization, white radicals such as Walling successfully insisted that the organization’s permanent staff include “a colored leader of nationwide prominence.” They selected Du Bois for the task, launching him on a new career as the NAACP’s director of publications and research—a post that also made him the editor of its journal, The Crisis. By contrast, Wells-Barnett, who had hoped that the new organization would provide an opportunity to revive the antilynching bureau she once ran under the auspices of the Afro-American Council, received no such appointment. Invited to attend the 1910 meeting, all expenses paid, she came. And she even took a position on the NAACP’s executive board, where she helped launch The Crisis by arguing that the NAACP should develop its “own organ” rather than relying on “already established” publications to represent “our cause.”92 But with The Crisis in Du Bois’s hands, she never found a role in the NAACP. Ill-suited to “the restraints of organization” in an era when those restraints fell particularly hard on black women, Wells-Barnett became increasingly distrustful of biracial organizations in the last decades of her life.
But she was no happier in the national organization of black women that she helped found. She revisited the National Association of Colored Women in 1910 on behalf of the NAACP. But at that organization’s meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, Wells-Barnett soon found herself at odds with Margaret Murray Washington in a debate over the editorship of the NACW’s periodical National Notes. Still perhaps hoping to find a national platform for her views, she led an unsuccessful attempt to challenge Mrs. Washington’s control over the publication—which was both published and edited by Mrs. Washington and printed by Tuskegee Institute students at no cost to the NACW. In doing so, Ida had the support of NACW members who complained that the publication appeared somewhat sporadically and never published submissions containing any criticism of Booker T. Washington. But her motion that the NACW take over the magazine and open its editorial leadership to election was overruled and tabled by the chair of the meeting—and Wells-Barnett was hissed off the floor when she challenged the decision. Disappointed by “that spirit which seems to dominate every organization we have,” Wells-Barnett withdrew from the NACW.93
She remained a committed activist, but the last two decades of her life would see her largely confining her talents to local black organizations, where her uncompromising character was less of a liability.
8
Reforming Chicago
ON NOVEMBER 9, 1909, A BLACK MAN NAMED WILLIAM “FROG” James was arrested in Cairo, Illinois, a river town at the southern tip of the state. A tall, burly teamster, James was charged with the rape and murder of Annie Pelley, a young white woman who worked as a salesgirl in a local department store. James may have been guilty: after Pelley’s body was discovered in an alley, bloodhounds followed the scent on the piece of cloth used to strangle her to his home, where the police found a handkerchief made of the same fabric—or so the news reports claimed. But the case against James never made it to any court of law. Two days later he was dead, hanged from a steel arch that graced the city’s main intersection. He died at the hands of a mob of some ten thousand people, who even turned on the gaslights that illuminated the arch to better enjoy the spectacle. The crowd included several hundred women, some of whom helped string James up, as well as countless armed men, who riddled James’s body with hundreds of bullets after the rope used to suspend his body broke. After hanging and shooting James, his executioners dragged his corpse to the alley where Pelley had been found and set it on fire. But before they torched his body, members of the mob removed his heart and other organs to preserve as souvenirs. They also cut off his head—which they mounted on the fencepost nearest the scene of his crime.
Their carnage, however, did not end with James’s death and decapitation. Intent on finding another “suitable victim,” James’s killers marched on the jail looking for Arthur Alexander, a second black man also charged in the Pelley case.1 When they could not find him they bludgeoned open the cell of Henry Salzner, a white man awaiting trial for killing his wife with an ax. After hanging Salzner, the mob left to track down Arthur Alexander. Alexander died the next day.
The Cairo lynchings caught Ida B. Wells-Barnett in a rare moment of despondency. Her hopes for reviving her antilynching bureau with the support of the NAACP had been crushed. A little more than a year after the Springfield riot, she still had no organizational support to bring to bear against racial violence in Illinois. Though she led a mass protest meeting of Chicago blacks, she balked when her husband urged her to go to Cairo to investigate. “I don’t see why I should have to go and do the work that others refuse,” she told Ferdinand over dinner as the couple discussed the case one evening in late November.2
Her usually mild-mannered spouse, however, was anxious for a report on events in Cairo, so he pressed the issue. Cairo would be the first real test of Illinois’s 1905 antilynching law, which held officers of the law responsible for any violence against prisoners in their custody. Since Cairo sheriff Frank Davis had handed Frog James over to the mob, the new law should have cost Davis his job.3 But now, weeks after the lynching, it seemed as if he would receive no lasting penalty, Barnett explained to his wife, as the family finished their evening meal. Governor Charles Deneen of Illinois had been reluctant to even suspend the sheriff from his post while the matter was investigated—as the new law required. He had done so only after black protesters demanded he “do his duty,” and now seemed ready to reinstate him almost immediately. Barnett worried that the Illinois antilynching law was going to be proved a dead letter. “You will have to go to Cairo and get the facts with which to confront the Sheriff,” he told his wife.4
Ida was not persuaded. She “had already been accused very strongly by some of our men of jumping in ahead of them and doing work without giving them a chance,” she told her husband. For once, she was willing to “let them attend to the job.” Moreover, she did not have the legal expertise needed to contest Davis’s reinstatement, and was busy raising her children and leading the Negro Fellowship League—a new community organ
ization that she created in 1908. Moreover, the forty-seven-year-old mother of four may have also felt too exhausted to go. In her autobiography Ida noted that although her husband urged her to leave that very night, she made no move to do so. Instead, she ended their argument by picking up five-year-old Alfreda and carrying her off to her bed, where she sang both her daughter and herself to sleep.
She was woken a little later that evening by Charles, her eldest, who told her, “Mother, if you don’t go nobody else will.” That the lanky thirteen-year-old had been following his parents’ argument surprised her. Moreover, it moved her, providing Ida with the impetus she needed. “From the mouths of babes and sucklings,” she reflected, with her usual activist understanding of the Scriptures. She left the next morning, buoyed by the support of her family. “Intensely interested in her mission,” all four of the children accompanied their father when he saw her off at the train station.5
The abiding political support that Ida received from her family helps us understand the last two decades of her life. During these years, Wells-Barnett remained as politically active as ever, while staying much closer to home. Always uncomfortable in the confines of national organizations such as the NACW and the NAACP, Wells increasingly shifted her attention to community activism; Chicago and Illinois became the major sites of her reformist energies.
Wells-Barnett’s Illinois-based activism was also a response to the increasingly pressing social problems faced by black communities throughout the state. They were especially severe in Chicago, which was becoming a major destination for the first waves of the Great Migration of black Southerners to the urban North that would reshape the nation during the first half of the twentieth century. Only 30,000 in 1900, Chicago’s black population expanded exponentially thereafter, rising to 44,000 by 1910, reaching 109,000 ten years later, and hitting the quarter of a million mark in 1935. With the flood of migrants came a host of social problems. The rural black Southerners who sought work within the city’s booming industrial economy were excluded from labor unions and many factory jobs—except when called upon to serve as strikebreakers. Moreover, as their numbers grew and the labor market became increasingly racially divided, race relations declined. Unwelcome in most white neighborhoods, the migrants were crowded into dilapidated and inadequate housing on the South Side, where they were likewise excluded from many of the city’s social services.
