To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  Now a fugitive from justice as well as a lynch mob, Green made it as far north as Chicago before he was caught and held for extradition. Convinced that he would be “burned alive” if returned to Arkansas, he ate ground glass when the extradition order went through.29 But his suicide attempt failed, and Green was put on a train for Crittenden County in the custody of an Arkansas lawman who told him, “Steve, you are the most important ‘Nigger’ in the United States: there will be a thousand men at the station when we get there and we will have a rope and coal oil ready to burn you alive.”30

  Reading about Green’s case in the morning papers just as he was to depart, Wells-Barnett contacted black attorneys Edward H. Wright and W. G. Anderson to obtain a writ of habeas corpus on the fugitive’s behalf. The lawyers telegraphed and telephoned news of the writ to sheriffs in all the towns on the railroad line, catching up with Green in Cairo, Illinois, where the local sheriff arrested him and sent him back to Chicago. Ida had managed to snatch him from the mob’s waiting hands. Back in Chicago he slept at the NFL and managed to dodge subsequent extradition attempts until Arkansas abandoned his case as “hopeless.” “He is one Negro who lives to tell the tale that he was not burned alive according to the program,” Ida reported in Crusade for Justice.31

  Green’s successful escape was featured in the first issue of the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, although W.E.B. Du Bois’s discussion of the case never managed to mention Wells-Barnett. In the NFL, Ida had clearly found a far more congenial organization than the NAACP. “Lifted to seventh heaven” when the league’s reading room and social center first opened, Ida promoted its activities tirelessly for nearly a decade.32 With all of her children now in school, she was free to work at the league on a daily basis. Accordingly, for the first three years of its existence, Ida staffed the NFL employment bureau, oversaw all of its programs, and between 1911 and 1914 also managed to publish an NFL newspaper, The Fellowship Herald.

  Chronically underfunded, the NFL never achieved the large membership Ida hoped to attract. Between forty and fifty men used its facilities and services each day, and its lodgings were often full. But with only a secretary on the payroll, the league could not do much work “among the people in the neighborhood.” Moreover, the NFL’s funding declined dramatically after the YMCA opened a new facility for African Americans on Wabash in 1913. Committed to funding the league only for its first year, Victor Lawson transferred his donations back to the Y.33 Despite the work being done at the NFL, he preferred to support the YMCA’s staff of white social service professionals over the headstrong Wells-Barnett—whose expenditures and programs did not always meet with his approval.34

  Lawson’s withdrawal left Ida in desperate need of funding. Convinced “that the YMCA would never take over the work that we were doing,” and worried that the Y’s annual membership fee of twelve dollars was more than many migrants could afford, she was unwilling to consider closing the NFL.35 Ida tried to solicit support for the NFL center from the Sears Roebuck mogul Julius Rosenwald, but managed to offend the leader of the committee Rosenwald sent to visit the NFL almost immediately. Mr. Sachs opened his meeting with Wells-Barnett by repeating a joke that he had heard Booker T. Washington deliver earlier that week. It was a folksy and not particularly funny story about an old man who did not mind that his “wife had left him,” but for the fact that “she had left the chicken coop door open and all the chickens had gone home too.” Not amused, Ida not only “didn’t laugh” but compounded her offense by explaining that blacks questioned Washington’s leadership precisely on account of such jokes. Would Chicago Jews admire the prominent Rabbi Hirsch, she asked, “if every time he appeared before a gentile audience he would amuse them by telling stories about Jews burning down their stores to get insurance?” Having made her visitor silent and red in the face, she then went on to answer the question herself: “I am sure you would not, and a great many of us cannot approve Mr. Washington’s plan of telling chicken-stealing stories on his own people in order to amuse his audiences and get money for Tuskegee.”36

  “Needless to say, the conversation ended there,” Wells-Barnett noted in her autobiography, with no apparent regret.37 But as usual, she paid a high price for her outspokenness. Six months behind on the rent, she attempted to turn the NFL over to the Methodists, but when church officials questioned the absence of “leading people of the race” in the league she changed her mind. An organization of workingmen, NFL leaders included an elevator man, a redcap, and a ragpicker. Wells-Barnett had found that elite Chicago blacks did not want “to know…men of this type” and had little interest in working with them. Deciding to retain her leadership over the NFL, she slashed expenses dramatically by the simple expedient of moving the organization to a much more modest facility—a little storefront on State Street.

  With no major donor after 1913, Wells-Barnett was obliged to provide much of the organization’s operating budget herself—which she accomplished by taking work as an adult parole officer and dedicating her monthly salary of $150 to cover the NFL’s expenses. Wells-Barnett was appointed to her new job by municipal court chief justice Harry Olsen, who appreciated what the NFL was doing for migrants with legal troubles and was anxious to see it stay open. Though Wells-Barnett’s work as a parole officer meshed well with her objectives for the NFL, her daily life became grueling. Between 1913 and 1915, Ida was stretched thin by long days in court, followed by nights at the NFL, where she met with her probationers. Forced to all but abandon her home life, Ida gave up her annual summertime trips to the country in favor of sweltering summers working in Chicago.

  Still, despite Ida’s workload, the NFL was a growing concern. In 1913, Illinois passed the Municipal and Presidential Voting Act, and as a result Wells-Barnett was soon hard at work organizing black women to vote. A product of years of activism by Illinois suffragists, the limited suffrage bill was designed to avoid any conflict with the state constitution. It allowed Illinois women to vote in municipal and presidential elections, and in some but not all state contests as well—providing female suffrage for all state offices not specifically designated in the state constitution as requiring a vote by male electors. A tremendous victory despite these limitations, the new law made Illinois among the very first states to allow female suffrage of any kind. A lifelong supporter of women’s suffrage, Wells-Barnett had been active in the Republican Party for many years, and had even founded the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club in 1910 “to assist men in getting better laws for the race and having representation in everything which tends to represent the city and its national government.”38 After the passage of the 1913 law, she wasted no time, especially in the Second Ward, which had a majority black population but no black elected officials. Working with Belle Squire, a white columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Ida organized the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC).39 With Ida presiding, the group met weekly at the Negro Fellowship League “to study political and social questions.” They also canvassed the neighborhood block by block asking women “to register so that they would help put a colored man on the city council.”40

  Committed to nationwide female suffrage as well, women of the ASC also raised money to send Wells-Barnett to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) parade in Washington on March 13, 1913. There, Ida made the national news one more time. As a concession to its Southern membership, the NAWSA imposed a segregation policy on its state suffrage affiliates. In deference to Southern sentiments about black suffrage, male or female, NAWSA required all black suffragists to march at the end of the parade in one unit rather than appearing in their state delegations. Though the NAWSA policy conflicted with the policies of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, whose president, Grace Wilbur Trout, had approved an integrated state delegation, when the Illinois delegation assembled, Trout told them that the parade’s organizers had advised them “to keep the delegation entirely white” and that she intended to honor their request. A heated argument ensued. With the support of Belle Sq
uire and Grace Brooks, another white Illinois suffragist, Ida insisted, “I shall not march at all unless I can march under the Illinois banner.” But Trout and other members of the Illinois delegation proved unwilling to “go against the law of the national organization,” and they carried the day.41

  Mortified, Wells-Barnett promptly left the group, seemingly to join the other African American suffragists—as instructed. But she had not given up. When the Illinois delegation marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, Ida stepped out from the crowd that had assembled to watch and “walked calmly out to the delegation and assumed her place.” A news report noted, “There was no question about her eligibility and she finished the march.”42 Any objections that her presence might have inspired among Southern women were overshadowed by the crowds of men that mobbed the procession, almost bringing it to a halt. But Wells-Barnett’s transgressive appearance in the parade was captured by the Chicago Tribune, which ran a photograph of her marching alongside Squire and Brooks in the Illinois delegation—a little smile on her face.43

  Among those who took inspiration from the photo may well have been Chicago’s black women voters, who turned out in large numbers in the 1914 elections, coming only 167 votes short of delivering one of the Second Ward’s primaries to William R. Cowan, an independent black candidate for alderman. Thereafter, Republicans of both races courted the Second Ward’s black female voters. By 1916, the Alpha Suffrage Club had two hundred members and had become a force to be reckoned with. Led by Ida, that year they helped elect Chicago’s first black alderman: Oscar De Priest, who would have a long and successful political career, but prove no longtime ally to Ida.

  Wells-Barnett marching with other women suffragists in a parade in Washington, D.C., 1913

  Indeed, Ida’s involvement with municipal politics would prove the undoing of her municipal job as a parole officer in 1915. That year, she committed the Alpha Suffrage Club to support the candidacy of William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, only to withdraw her support later after Judge Harry Olsen announced his candidacy. Continuing to support Thompson would have required her to discredit Olsen, to whom she owed her job as parole officer. Ida could not do it: “All my life I have been the victim of ingrates,” she noted in her autobiography. “I have constantly affirmed that I agree with the old time Spartans in spirit, anyhow, when they put ingrates to death.”44 Ida attempted to change her course gracefully, even securing Thompson another well-connected black community leader to help his campaign. Still her wavering loyalties cost her her job. Big Bill Thompson won, partially thanks to Wells-Barnett’s initial efforts, but he did not forgive her for her last-minute defection. Less than six months later he appointed a white parole officer to replace her.

  While Ida’s reduced daily workload must have been something of a relief to the entire Barnett family, it also meant that the “Negro Fellowship Reading Room and Social Center had again to fall back on what we could make from our employment office.” That income would keep the NFL open for five more years—although on a shoestring, since “nobody who applied for a job was ever turned away.”45 Moreover, the NFL’s expenditures included securing legal support for African Americans who ran afoul of the Illinois justice system—although much of it was supplied pro bono by Ferdinand Barnett.

  Their work bridged the growing class divide that separated Chicago’s established black professionals and the young black men who languished in local prisons such as Joliet. The “common people” who populated the NFL, Ida noted, were willing “to give their mite to help a man who they believed to be innocent.” But Chicago race leaders were far less good-hearted. In particular, she claimed, “all of our leading politicians, doctors, lawyers, and prominent people” refused to support “Chicken Joe” Campbell, a Joliet prisoner who was put on trial for the rape and murder of the prison warden’s wife.46 Though Campbell eventually won the support of a number of local churches, as well as Robert S. Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, Campbell’s cause was indeed ignored by the Chicago NAACP—an organization whose members included some of Chicago’s most prominent black citizens.

  Campbell came to Ida’s attention in the spring of 1915 after Chicago papers reported he had been confined to solitary in complete darkness for fifty hours on bread and water. She immediately wrote a scathing letter to local newspapers and also sent an NFL lawyer to Joliet to represent the defendant. “Is this justice? Is this humanity? Can we stand to see a dog treated in such a fashion without protest?” Campbell was one of several Joliet prisoners suspected of setting a fire that resulted in the death of the prison warden’s wife. There was no evidence of rape, the body having been burned in the fire; Campbell was nevertheless charged with rape and murder, largely because, Ida suspected, he was “the only colored man around.” “Sweated and tortured to…confess,” he maintained his innocence once he secured a lawyer.47 And thereafter the Barnetts and the NFL saw him through his trial and three appeals, the last of which resulted in his sentence being commuted from death to life in prison.

  Other legal battles brought more decisive victories. In 1918, just after Campbell’s final appeal, Ida was able to secure a pardon for J. K. Smith, another Joliet inmate. Smith had been falsely convicted of kidnapping a child who turned up two years later in the custody of a Chicago couple, who then stood trial for the same crime. “A poor man, without friends,” he finally secured his release with an appeal to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who collected the legal papers needed to secure his pardon.48

  The NFL challenged racial discrimination outside the justice system as well.49 In 1913, led by Ida, the league banded together with other black organizations in Chicago to defeat a bill that would have segregated the city’s streetcars and Pullman cars. The lone woman on the delegation, Ida spoke on behalf of both the NFL and the city’s black women’s club. The group spent a day at the state legislature, where they succeeded in denouncing the bill so vigorously that “the author of the measure…declared he was sorry that he had presented the bill and had never met such a brilliant array of colored people in his life.”50

  Some of the NFL’s efforts had mixed results. In 1915, the NFL combined forces with the NAACP to seek an injunction against the screening of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, an epic silent film about Reconstruction still infamous for its racist depiction of the freedmen, who were played by leering white men in blackface. But the municipal court refused their request and Griffith’s film ended up running “for many weeks in Chicago,” a fiasco that Ida blamed on poor preparation on the part of the NAACP lawyer who presented black Chicago’s case. Wells-Barnett and the league also lent their support to successful battles against other discriminatory measures ranging from a federal bill outlawing interracial marriage inspired by prizefighter Jack Johnson’s notorious union with a white teenager to a weekly segregated social hour hosted by Chicago’s Wendell Phillips High School.

  Despite its financial woes, the NFL was clearly Ida’s longest-lasting and most satisfying organizational commitment. The league’s freewheeling agenda seems to have been largely at her disposal. Acting within her capacity as president, Wells-Barnett challenged everyday racial slights as energetically as she did more serious injustices. Her small battles ranged from a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune rebuking the paper for referring to a recently deceased black Civil War veteran as an “aged darkey” to publicly lamenting the lack of African American speakers at the 1914 dedication of Illinois’s Eighth Regiment, a black military unit.51 She also secured the immediate dismissal of a Marshall Field’s department store salesclerk who told her, “I don’t have to wait on a black ‘nigger’ like you.”52

  Ida’s “everyday resistance” to Jim Crow in all its incarnations was an irrepressible part of her personality rather than a product of her organizational or political commitment.53 Despite sharing similar political views and affiliations, Ferdinand Barnett was nowhere near as combative as his wife in daily life. Ferdinand’s “aggressiveness and his work on civil rights were mostl
y with his pen,” noted the couple’s daughter Alfreda Duster. By contrast, Ida’s militant spirit permeated her daily life. Alfreda remembered her mother as “walking the halls” of her grade school, always ready to intervene if her children had any trouble with their teachers. And Barnett family lore included comical examples of Ida’s unflagging opposition to Jim Crow, such as the story of the time when she got tired of waiting to be served at Marshall Field’s, a store many black people avoided “because you knew they wouldn’t treat you right.” Unwilling to leave empty-handed, Wells-Barnett simply picked up her purchase—“a pair of men’s underpants…put them over her arm, and walked toward the door. Immediately, a floor walker stopped her, and so she was able to buy them.” Ida’s story of this “funny incident” became a part of family history. Years later Alfreda was still amused by the image of the ever-militant “Ida B. Wells-Barnett with a pair of men’s underpants dangling over her arm.” “She was only five foot three or four, and she had grown plump in her fifties,” Alfreda said, thinking about how her mother must have looked as she marched out of the store, “but she walked as if she owned the world. She floated.”54

  In short, the spirited and often impulsive activism that often got Ida into trouble in organizational settings flourished within the Negro Fellowship League. In part, the league afforded her greater freedom because she was its only well-known leader, and supplied much of its funding. But at issue was not just the lack of other contenders to lead the NFL. Rather, the working-class blacks who supported the league were far more open to Ida’s leadership than the largely middle-class race leaders she had worked with in the past. A child of ex-slaves with roots in the rural South, she lacked the elite pedigree, college degree, and social standing that characterized many of the leaders of the NAACP and the National Association of Black Women’s Clubs. But she was well versed in the challenges faced by the NFL center’s working-class men. Long accustomed to working with men, she had raised her brothers, supervised her stepsons, and now had two teenage sons of her own. Self-educated and self-made herself, she also understood the class aspirations that inspired league members to take “courses in law and medicine while they earned their daily bread at the post office.” Indeed, the NFL helped sponsor community-wide essay contests that nourished the intellectual aspirations of ordinary black Chicagoans, taking pride in the fact that NFL members regularly excelled in such competitions.