To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  A 1909 portrait of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her four children. On her right is her thirteen-year old, Charles, and on her left is his brother, Herman, twelve. Eight-year-old Ida sits in the middle of the photograph, behind the baby of the family—the five-year-old Alfreda.

  Black Chicago’s social problems soon preoccupied Ida. She repeatedly challenged the color line, helping to fight off several school segregation plans and contesting discrimination against blacks in stores and other public facilities. And although she never abandoned her national fight against lynching and racial violence, after 1910 Wells-Barnett grew increasingly concerned with addressing the problems faced by black migrants in her own region.

  Consequently, Wells-Barnett figured less and less prominently on the national scene, a development that has led some to characterize the older Ida as a “lonely warrior” who ended her career in isolation.6 While such characterizations capture Wells-Barnett’s increasing alienation from the national organizations that she had helped found, most notably the NAACP and the NACW, her isolation should not be exaggerated. During the 1910s and 1920s she did not so much work alone as turn to a more community-based political work, while at the same time sustaining an immersion in the life of her family that often fostered such work. At no point in her long and busy professional life did Ida spend much time working alone, and her later years were no exception. Instead, she drew on a variety of social and political networks that began in her own household and extended across Illinois, which would prove far more susceptible to Ida’s influence than the national scene.

  “Mob Violence Has No Place in Illinois”

  Ida’s trip to Cairo provided her with one of the rare unqualified victories of her political life. She arrived to find Cairo’s blacks united in the belief that Frog James had committed the murder with which he had been charged, and therefore supporting Sheriff Davis’s reinstatement. Davis was a popular Republican officeholder who had won the respect of Cairo blacks by employing several African American deputies. James, on the other hand, “was a worthless fellow”—or so the town’s leading A.M.E. minister told Wells-Barnett. The first challenge Wells-Barnett faced in Cairo was to convince the town’s black leaders that the sheriff should be punished for permitting mob violence, despite the low character of the victims. Cairo blacks, she told the minister, could not condone the lynching of “any fellowman who was a member of the race.” If they did so, “the time might come when they had to condone that of other men higher up, providing that they were black.”7

  Ida began by enlisting the help of Will Taylor, a black pharmacist whom she knew from Chicago. With Taylor’s help, she spent her first day in Cairo talking to the town’s “colored citizens.” By that evening, the two had assembled a well-attended community meeting where Wells-Barnett explained “that it would be endangering the lives of other colored people in Illinois if we did not take a stand.” At issue was not Frog James’s crime or personal character, she maintained, but whether “Mr. Frank Davis had used his great power to protect the victim of the mob; if he had at any time placed him behind the bars of the county jail as the law required; and if he had sworn in any deputies to help protect his prisoner.”8

  Wells-Barnett’s probing inquiries raised questions that even the black men who had worked as Davis’s deputies could not answer in the affirmative. Davis claimed that he had attempted to protect James by removing him from the town jail and hiding him in the woods outside town the night before the lynching. But in doing so, Davis may well have made James all the more accessible. The mob, after all, had had little trouble tracking him down in the woods, and wresting him from Davis and the one deputy that he had enlisted to help him. Moreover, both lawmen surrendered James to the mob without ever firing a shot; Davis had even managed to keep his gun.9 By the meeting’s end, Ida had succeeded in reversing black Cairo’s support for Davis. She left with a resolution against him, signed by many who had previously supported reinstatement.

  Armed with the resolution, Wells-Barnett spoke against Davis at a hearing held in Springfield later that week. “Not another Negro face was in evidence,” leaving her to “represent the colored people of Illinois” on her own—although a local black lawyer named A. M. Williams later joined her. As the only nonlawyer speaking to an audience that included Governor Charles Deneen, Ida was grateful for Williams’s support and advice. The hearing pitted her against Davis’s lawyer, a former state senator who was also one of the “biggest lawyers in southern Illinois.”10 Ida presented the facts she had gathered in Cairo along with a brief on the legal barriers to Davis’s reinstatement written by Ferdinand Barnett. The day ended with Governor Deneen requesting both sides to negotiate an “agreed statement of fact” on the case that he could consult before rendering any decision. Although “not a lawyer,” as a journalist Wells-Barnett was utterly confident that she knew “a statement of fact when I saw one,” and had no trouble holding her ground against her high-powered opponent as they haggled over the details to be included.11

  Much to the surprise of everyone involved, Ida’s understanding of the case prevailed. Her research convinced Governor Deneen that “Davis did not do all in his power to protect the prisoners.” In denying Davis’s petition for reinstatement, Deneen also issued a powerful public condemnation of lynching: “Mob violence has no place in Illinois,” he wrote. “It is denounced in every line of the constitution and every statute. Instead of breeding respect for law; it breeds contempt. When such mob violence threatens the life of a prisoner in the custody of the Sheriff, the law has charged the Sheriff under the penalty of the forfeiture of his office, to use the utmost human endeavor to protect the life of his prisoner. The law may be severe: whether severe or not it must be enforced.”12

  An outstanding victory for Wells-Barnett, Deneen’s ruling all but ended lynching in Illinois. Thereafter, Illinois sheriffs took to calling in additional deputies and support rather than give in to the mob whenever racial violence loomed. Racial violence continued, but it was no longer completely unopposed by state officials, whose vigilance helped Illinois “put lynching legally in its past.”13

  Moreover, Ida’s work on the Cairo lynching helped her find new supporters. Propelled to Cairo by the encouragement of her family, Ida returned to Chicago rejuvenated, and resumed “the work that others refuse.” The NAACP had supplied no aid to her work in Cairo. Instead, she had had to depend on the local black community. On her return to Chicago, Wells-Barnett continued to so do, turning to her fledgling community organization, the Negro Fellowship League, rather than the NAACP, to support her.

  In some respects an unlikely outlet for Wells-Barnett’s wide-ranging reform commitments, the league originated as a Bible study class. However, Wells-Barnett had always understood the Scriptures as a source of political inspiration, and so too would the young men who joined the class that Ida agreed to teach after she and her daughters joined the Grace Presbyterian Church in 1904. Ida’s commitment to Grace Church underscored how raising a family had changed her day-to-day life. During her Memphis years, Ida had never committed to any one Protestant denomination, but she wanted her children brought up the same way she had been—“in a Christian home under the influence of a Sunday School and Church.” Accordingly, prior to 1904, the entire Barnett family attended Ferdinand’s longtime church home, the Bethel A.M.E. However, after their pastor, the radical minister Reverdy C. Ransom, left to found an urban mission in the heart of the South Side, the Barnetts sought out a new church; Ida could not abide Ransom’s replacement, Abraham Lincoln Murray—a man who stood accused of making advances to one of his married female parishioners. So she and her husband sought out new places of worship, and ended up attending different churches. Ferdinand and the boys began to attend a Baptist church, while Ida and the girls joined Grace Presbyterian. Why the couple attended different churches is not clear, although Ferdinand Barnett may not have shared his wife’s flexibility when it came to matters of denomination. Ida embraced Grace Church even though s
he “was not Presbyterian by doctrine.” As she explained in her autobiography, “Since all Christian doctrines agreed on a standard of conduct and right living it mattered very little to me what name we bore.”14

  The Negro Fellowship League

  At Grace Church, Wells-Barnett found not only a “new church home” but a new base for her political activism. Her Bible study classes were “delightful,” attracting a group of twenty-five to thirty young men, “ranging from eighteen to thirty years of age.” Ida and her pupils “discussed the Bible lessons in a plain commonsense way and tried to make the application of their truths to our daily life.” Not surprisingly, such discussions eventually led to activism. Troubled by the Springfield riot in 1908, members of the class began to meet in the Barnett home to discuss “what we can do.”15 Encouraged by their teacher, they founded the Negro Fellowship League (NFL), which favored political debate over Bible study. Dedicated to social change, the NFL also began to admit women, at which point “it gradually became quite the thing” for its members “to bring their lady friend.” Eight or nine years old when these meetings began, young Alfreda Barnett was a regular participant, and remembered being “thrilled” by the opportunity to spend time with the “big kids,” whose meetings became increasingly activist over time.16 NFL members supported Ida’s mission to Cairo as well as both Barnetts’ interest in the small but growing population of black men imprisoned at Joliet Penitentiary—the northern Illinois prison that served the Chicago area.

  Casualties of the Great Migration, many of these men were rural Southerners whose legal troubles had begun as they struggled to make their way in an overcrowded and increasingly unwelcoming city. For much of its history, Chicago had been a place where most whites hardly knew that “there were a thousand Colored people” in their midst—and expressed little racial hostility as a result.17 Before the Great Migration black Chicagoans were less segregated than the city’s Italian immigrant population. They lived in African American enclaves scattered across eight or nine neighborhoods—most of which were otherwise white. But when thousands of rural blacks began to pour into Chicago during the 1910s, the city’s relatively tranquil race relations began to change. White Chicagoans proved unwilling to house the black newcomers, so most of the migrants were forced into a narrow, thirty-block stretch of dilapidated housing on the South Side—already Chicago’s seediest black neighborhood. As the migration continued, the South Side, along with one other black neighborhood on the West Side, would increasingly become the only areas open to African American residents. With residential segregation came other attacks on black civil liberties that contemporary observers likened to “the hardening of Jim Crow patterns in the South.”18 Among them was the relentless policing of the young black Southerners who came to Chicago looking for work. Many had trouble finding work or a place to stay, and often ended up in jail as a result.

  Assistant State’s Attorney Ferdinand Barnett encountered many such migrants, and often “brought home some of these boys he believed were innocent” as well as young men “that he had gotten out of jail” but “didn’t have any place to go.” For her part, Ida began to visit the state prison at Joliet after receiving invitations from prisoners there. She found that “some of them came from good homes” and most “had been well educated.” Moreover, she relayed the inmates’ problems to the young men in the Negro Fellowship League, encouraging them “to begin practical studies which would bring us in closer touch with those members of our race who were swelling the criminal records.”19 Long worried about the special dangers the American justice system posed to young blacks, Ida hoped the league could help the young black men arriving in the city daily from the rural South.

  As hardworking, “consecrated” young men whose families hailed from the South, the organization’s members, Wells-Barnett believed, were ideally situated to provide guidance to more recent migrants struggling to survive in Chicago—if they could raise the resources to do so.20 Such help was desperately needed. The uneducated and impoverished rural migrants were shunned by the “better class of our people,” and unwelcome at most social service agencies. “While every class is welcome in the Y.M.C.A. dormitories, Y.W.C.A. homes, the Salvation Army and the Mills hotels,” Wells-Barnett lamented, “not one of these will give a Negro a bed to sleep in or permit him to use their reading rooms or gymnasiums.”21

  “Only one social center welcomes the Negro and that is the saloon,” Wells-Barnett declared in 1910 at a meeting of the Congregational Union at the Palmer House, an elegant Chicago hotel. An affluent white organization, the union hosted a lecture by Dr. James G. K. McClure, a Presbyterian clergyman. McClure described Chicago’s African American social problems as the failings of an inferior race and “The White Man’s Burden.” Ida’s rebuttal was heated. “The statistics we have heard tonight,” she explained, do not mean “that the Negro race is the most criminal of the various in Chicago. It does mean that ours is one of the most neglected groups.” At issue was the Chicago environment that many black migrants encountered: the only accommodations and amusements open to blacks were located on State Street—in the heart of the city’s vice district. “Here they found only saloons, buffet flats, poolrooms, and gambling houses…With no friends, they were railroaded into the penitentiary.”22

  For once, Ida profited from her outspokenness. In the Palmer House audience was Mrs. Victor Lawson, the wife of the owner of The Chicago Daily News. Although she and her husband were among the YMCA’s major donors, the Lawsons had been unaware that it did not serve blacks. After verifying Ida’s claims, they withdrew their funding from the Y and offered to support Wells-Barnett in establishing a facility that blacks could use. Delighted, Ida proposed a league reading room and social center that would serve as a “sort of lighthouse…on State Street.” There, NFL members would “be on the lookout for these young people and extend to them a helping hand.” Such a place, Ida told the Lawsons, could become “self-sustaining,” once it got off the ground.23

  The Lawsons agreed, and with their support Wells-Barnett rented a building on State Street and opened the “Negro Fellowship League Reading Room and Social Center for men and boys” on May 10, 1910. The league’s new home was in a neighborhood “so questionable” that some NFL members refused to visit the place. Likewise, “the secretaries whom we employed were averse to visiting the poolhalls, saloons, and street corners to find and invite young men and distribute cards.” But Ida regarded the center’s location as ideal. “State Street needed them,” she told reluctant members of the league.24

  Ida was untroubled by the raucous neighborhood. When a noisy craps game disrupted the league’s very first Sunday program, Ida marched out and introduced herself to “dirty disreputable men seated on the ground” enjoying “a bucket of beer.” Asking them to be “a little more quiet,” she invited them to join the NFL Reading Room. Embarrassed by this gentle rebuke, the gamblers disbursed and NFL events were “never again disturbed or molested.” Ida claimed the NFL was a damper to crime, leading to fewer police patrols and even one fewer brothel—its proprietor relocated, finding the NFL chorus’s weekly performances of “Sunday school and church hymns…too much of a reproach to her conscience.”25

  Staffed by one employee and a roster of volunteers, the NFL’s reading room was open from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and housed a “selected library of history, biography, fiction and race literature especially.” It offered visitors a place to read, study, write letters, and pursue a “quiet game of checkers, dominoes or other games that would not interfere with those who wished to read.” Nonalcoholic refreshments were available—or as the NFL’s announcements noted, “the young ladies of the League will have charge of the punch bowl, and hope to be able to give every visitor a glass of refreshing lemonade.”26 Visitors were also encouraged to attend weekly lectures by a variety of prominent speakers, ranging from white reformers such as Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington to black intellectuals such as William Monroe Trotter, Garland Penn, and the
historian Carter G. Woodson. Free and open to the public, these events attracted local people as well as league members. For example, Lucius C. Harper, who would later become editor of the Chicago Defender, long remembered the league from his youth on the South Side. He and friends were “loitering about the corner of 31st and State St.” one night when a league member on his way to hear a speech by Woodson invited them to attend. Harper went “just to pass the time away” and developed a lifelong passion for black history.27

  The NFL soon expanded its activities to meet the needs of black newcomers, offering men’s lodgings on the building’s second floor, where visitors could secure a bed for fifty cents a night, and even making food available to those in need—vouchers were offered for meals at a restaurant across the street. The NFL also began helping migrants find jobs, opening an employment bureau that placed 115 men during its first year alone.

  During that first year, Wells-Barnett also realized her goal of using the league to protect black men from injustice, mobilizing members to block the extradition of Steve Green, a fugitive from Crittenden County, Arkansas. Arrested in Chicago on August 14, 1910, Green had fled his home state earlier that summer after a lethal altercation with his former landlord, Will Saddler. The conflict began when Saddler and three other men tracked Green down to force him to continue working Saddler’s land. Having found better-paying work elsewhere, Green was not interested. But he soon found himself looking down the barrel of Saddler’s gun. “Green didn’t I tell you that if you didn’t work my farm this year there would not be enough room in Crittenden county for you and me to live,” the aggrieved Saddler told Green, before shooting him three times at close range.28 Badly wounded but still mobile, Green grabbed his own gun and fled, killing Saddler as he made his escape.