by Mia Bay
The NFL and the NERL
NFL members also allowed Wells-Barnett to ally their organization with other radical organizations, most notably William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League. A Niagara Movement member, Trotter had founded the NERL (originally called the Negro-American Political League) in 1908 to lobby the federal government to protect black civil rights.55 Like Wells-Barnett, Trotter had little patience for white moderates—who were equally impatient with him. Combative, arrogant, and outspoken, he had alienated Oswald Garrison Villard at the NAACP’s very first meeting in 1909. Much like Ida, Trotter never secured a post in the organization, even though he was one of the leaders of the anti-Washington movement that led to its founding. Unlike Wells-Barnett, however, Trotter did not turn to community organizing as a result. A Harvard graduate who attended white schools throughout his youth, Trotter was one of black Boston’s intellectual leaders rather than a community activist. Indeed, Trotter ran the NERL as a one-man show. The organization had no headquarters, staff, or budget, just a mailing list and a public forum provided by Trotter’s newspaper, the Boston Guardian.
A fiery militant all his life, Trotter directed his equal rights activism toward the federal government, enlisting the support of the NFL to broaden his base. Starting in the fall of 1913, the two organizations collaborated in protesting new regulations mandating the segregation of federal offices under President Woodrow Wilson. Trotter and Wells-Barnett traveled to D.C. to present Wilson with a petition signed by approximately twenty thousand, but their protest had no effect, inspiring Trotter to return the following year and make the national news by publicly berating President Wilson. Although Trotter was widely chided for his “insolence,” it met no criticism from Wells-Barnett, who afterward established a Chicago branch of the NERL. Moreover, she and Trotter went on to form an enduring political partnership. Though highly independent, opinionated, and aggressive people, they were in accord when it came to politics. Indeed, their collaboration suggests their difficulties with other race leaders of their day were as much a matter of politics as they were of personality.
Much of their work together combined organizational forces to protest the spread of Jim Crow laws and practices in their era’s municipal, state, and federal institutions. For example, the NERL lent support to Ida’s battle against Jim Crow streetcars in Chicago, while the two organizations combined to fight a bill prohibiting interracial marriage in D.C. and cosponsored a letter-writing campaign against a national immigration bill that would have banned African immigration. Tellingly, neither was ever willing to join forces with what was becoming the nation’s foremost civil rights organization: the NAACP.
Still headquartered in New York, the NAACP by 1914 had six thousand members and fifty branches. Du Bois remained the editor of The Crisis, and the only African American on staff. But he had managed to push the organization toward a militant integrationism that was not incompatible with the politics pursued by Trotter and Wells-Barnett. Moreover, the NAACP had also escaped the controlling imprint of Booker T. Washington, whose influence declined rapidly in the half decade prior to his death in 1915. Still neither Trotter nor Wells-Barnett proved responsive to Du Bois’s attempt to make the NAACP “the battle line” for all race work. Both distrusted Du Bois and were not impressed by the NAACP branches in their cities. The Boston NAACP was dominated by Bookerites in its early years, while the Chicago NAACP was home to many of the middle-class black leaders whom Ida had clashed with in the past.
“A Far More Dangerous Agitator
Than Marcus Garvey”
Instead, as World War I loomed, Trotter and Wells-Barnett soldiered on as “individual sharp shooters fighting their own effective guerrilla warfare”—to borrow a phrase from Du Bois.56 As maverick black radicals, however, both would become even more isolated after the United States officially entered into what was then called the Great War on April 6, 1917. Passed on May 17, 1917, the Selective Service Act recruited African Americans into a segregated and widely racist army. Moreover, many African Americans were ambivalent about lending their support to a war dedicated to protecting democratic freedoms abroad, when they had yet to secure such freedoms at home. “You white folk are going to war to fight for your rights. You all seem to want us to go,” an anonymous letter writer who wrote the federal government on behalf of the “Black Nation” noted. “If we was to fight for our rights, we would have a war among ourselves. The Germans has not done us harm and they cannot treat us any meaner than you all has.”57 Such complaints inspired surveillance rather than sympathy among government officials, who soon had the Bureau of Investigation (later to become the FBI) looking for German spies working to undermine the loyalty of black citizens. And when German agents could not be found, African Americans who spoke out on behalf of black civil rights became subject to federal scrutiny.
Not surprisingly, Ida and her husband attracted the attention of the bureau after they protested a vicious race riot that rocked East St. Louis, Illinois, on July 2, 1917. In her autobiography, Ida misremembered the riot as occurring in the summer of 1918. It occurred a year earlier and introduced her to the stark contradiction that African Americans faced when they were first recruited to support the “war for democracy.” Like many black families, the Barnetts supported the war effort from the start. Ida’s sons Herman and Charles both enlisted, as did her stepson Ferdinand, Jr. Moreover, Ida led the NFL’s 1917 campaign to prepare “Christmas kits” containing sweets and other seasonal gifts for “our boys” in the 183rd Brigade, a black brigade stationed at Camp Grant, Illinois.58 But the East St. Louis riot was a wrenching challenge to the patriotic loyalty of African American families across the nation.
The first of a series of race riots that took place during and immediately after World War I, the East St. Louis riot left thirty-nine blacks and nine whites dead and leveled much of the city’s black downtown. The violence erupted in the wake of an unsuccessful strike at the Aluminum Ore Company, a factory that supplied airplane parts to the U.S. military. Although most of the non-union workers the company recruited to break the strike were white, the strike took place at a time when East St. Louis Democrats accused the city’s political and industrial leaders of importing “Southern blacks to supply employers with non-Union labor and the Republican party with votes.” Although these charges had no basis in fact, they ensured that St. Louis blacks became the focus of its white population’s economic and political frustration. That frustration turned deadly one evening in July when blacks in downtown St. Louis, defending themselves from the white gangs who regularly shot up their neighborhood, fired on two white men cruising their neighborhood in a “big black touring car.”59 The two men in the car were not white gang members, but white policemen, who were both fatally wounded. The next morning, vengeful whites stormed the black section of East St. Louis, first beating and then killing black residents in a festival of violence that lasted all day.
East St. Louis during the July 1917 riot
The most destructive race riot of its era, it inspired protests in black communities across the country, including a fiery speech by a young Caribbean radical named Marcus Garvey, who maintained that “Monday [July] 2nd, will go down in history as one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind for which any class of people could be held guilty.”60 Garvey was a Jamaican who had come to the United States in 1916 on a fund-raising tour for the establishment of an industrial school in his home country. After giving talks across the country, including an address before the NFL, the radical black separatist decided to prolong his visit. Appalled by events such as the East St. Louis riot, in 1918 he established a chapter of his Jamaican organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Organization, in Harlem to promote racial uplift, racial unity, and political independence among American blacks. For Garvey, the East St. Louis riot was proof that “white people are taking advantage of black-men today because black-men all over the world are disunited.”61
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Ferdinand
Barnett would prove sympathetic to Garvey’s call to unite “the masses of our people and endow them with racial consciousness and unity.” But they never embraced his belief in a separate black nationality. For them, the state of Illinois, rather than black American political affiliations, was at fault in East St. Louis. After protesting earlier episodes of mob violence in Springfield and Cairo, the Barnetts were bitterly disappointed that their state had once again done nothing to protect its black citizens. Indeed, several Illinois National Guard members stationed in the city had either watched or joined the mob. At an NFL meeting on the riot, Ferdinand Barnett warned Chicago blacks that it was now clear that self-defense was the only option. “Arm yourselves with guns and pistols,” he told them. “Don’t buy an arsenal, but get enough guns to protect yourself…and when trouble starts let us not hesitate to call upon our Negro militia men to defend ourselves.”62
After a speech underscoring her long-standing belief that mob violence should be combated with investigation and protest, Ida was sent on a fact-finding tour. She arrived in East St. Louis the next day to find the city’s black population all but gone, and the militia accompanying a few female refugees who had returned to pick up clothing and other necessities. Braving an outbreak of smallpox among the refugees, Ida got a vaccination and traveled with them. Her investigation revealed that trouble had been brewing in East St. Louis well before the riots. Local blacks had even visited the governor a month before asking for protection against simmering labor conflicts. Wells-Barnett lobbied the governor to bring the rioters to justice, but the state’s investigation instead focused on the black men who had organized in their own defense. Sixteen were tried and convicted; all received sentences of no less than fifteen years. And while seventy-five whites were also tried, few were convicted and only ten received a sentence of longer than five years. The governor reported that justice had been served.
Published as The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Horror of the Century, Ida’s investigation was quickly censored by the military. But her account of the riot, which included interviews with riot victims documenting the violent participation of both the National Guard and the East St. Louis police, helped spur a congressional investigation. The Barnetts also took on the defense of Leroy Bundy, a black dentist charged with the murder of the two police officers—largely on the evidence that he had called for East St. Louis’s blacks to use armed self-defense to protect their neighborhood from the white gang violence that preceded the riot. Working with the NFL and the Chicago Defender, the Barnetts saw Bundy through several trials and appeals before he was finally acquitted in 1920. A drain on the Barnetts’ financial resources, the Bundy trial further strained their relationship with the NAACP, which had offered to represent the black men charged with participating in the riot but had failed to provide counsel for Bundy. Unlike the Barnetts, most of Chicago’s race leaders were very nervous about antagonizing state and federal officials at a time when the black community’s national loyalties were under scrutiny. Indeed, while Ida was in East St. Louis, a delegation of black men led by Congressman Oscar De Priest and attorney Edward H. Wright visited the Illinois governor to assure him they held him blameless. “The Barnetts were radicals,” Ida said they told him, and “he need pay no attention to resolutions which we had published in the papers.”63
Wartime pressures on African Americans to abandon criticism of the government would further marginalize the Barnetts, who refused to “forget our special grievances.” As radical as ever, early in the war they were labeled subversive by the Bureau of Investigation and the federal office of military intelligence. Ida’s pamphlet, The East St. Louis Massacre, caught the attention of the Department of War as a source of “inter-racial antagonism,” while her husband was labeled rabidly “pro-German.” An initial investigation into Barnett’s activities, however, went nowhere because Chicago Bureau of Immigration agents “failed to find a single black person willing to admit to having heard Barnett speak.”64
But the Barnetts were soon under investigation again in the wake of another riot. Stationed at Houston’s Camp Logan in mid-July, the Third Battalion of the Twenty-fourth Infantry was an African American unit that had remained on active duty ever since it was first organized during the Civil War. Composed of experienced soldiers, the regiment endured a long hot summer of segregation, racial epithets, and harassment at the hands of the Houston police that ended with one hundred black soldiers taking up arms against local whites on August 27, 1917. The conflict began after the police assaulted and then arrested two black soldiers in downtown Houston. By the time word of the arrests got back to camp, one of the soldiers was rumored to be dead. One hundred of his fellow soldiers took up arms and marched on downtown Houston, killing fifteen whites and injuring a dozen others. The U.S. military’s response was swift and severe, and made no allowances for the violence against the African American soldiers that had precipitated the riot. While white soldiers were disciplined, all of the black soldiers involved received court-martials, and thirteen were sentenced to death in hasty military trials without appeal. Black protests on behalf of the Houston rioters were muted. “We simply dare not start to try to express our feelings and those of our people as a result of this affair,” wrote the editor of the normally outspoken Cleveland Gazette; while The Baltimore Afro-American was censured into silence by the Justice Department after referring to the soldiers as “martyrs.”65
But Wells-Barnett, who also saw the soldiers as martyrs, refused to be silenced. The army had executed the leaders of the Houston riot, she believed, “to placate Southern hatred.” Accordingly, Ida encouraged the NFL to hold “a memorial service for the men whose lives had been taken and in that way utter a solemn protest,” a plan that failed when Ida could find no black church willing to host the event. So Ida settled for distributing buttons that she had ordered for the service. Emblazoned with the words “In Memorial MARTYRED NEGRO SOLDIERS,” they caught the attention of the Secret Service. But when confronted by two Secret Service agents, Ida stood her ground. “I am not guilty of treason,” she told them when they threatened to arrest her for disloyalty. She also refused to let them confiscate her buttons. “The government deserves to be criticized,” she told them. “I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than save my skin by taking back what I said.” And, true to her word, she continued “disposing of the buttons to anyone who wanted them.”66 Ida also modeled her button in a photograph that shows her much as she must have appeared to the Secret Service agents. Gray-haired, sweet-faced, and a little plump, Ida wore her button on a dress made of silk and lace. Adorned with a strand of pearls, she was the very image of a respectable middle-aged black woman.
A 1917 photograph of Ida B. Wells-Barnett wearing her button commemorating the MARTYRED NEGRO SOLDIERS executed for their participation in the Houston Riot
Ida featured as a “known race agitator” in military intelligence thereafter, and was refused a passport when she was selected to represent the NERL at the National Colored Congress for World Democracy in Versailles in 1919. The applications of other NERL members were also denied. William Monroe Trotter, who had also refused to “close ranks” during World War I, traveled to France on seaman’s papers, working his way across the Atlantic incognito as a cook on a small freighter. He missed much of the peace conference as a result, never securing admission to the National Colored Congress or gaining an audience with President Woodrow Wilson. Present at the Versailles peace conference, however, was NAACP representative W.E.B. Du Bois, who attended without difficulty.
By 1918, the NAACP had garnered recognition as the most prominent voice of the Negro, while both Wells-Barnett and Trotter were losing influence. In part, the shift was a result of the success of the protest tradition that Trotter, Wells-Barnett, and other black radicals had nurtured during Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist reign. Their fights against segregation and lynching had become central to
the NAACP. Moreover, Wells-Barnett’s pioneering work among South Side blacks in the NFL met a similarly ironic fate. Among the organizations that displaced the NFL was a branch of the YMCA dedicated to serving South Side blacks that originated at least in part as a result of her call for the establishment of social service organizations in Chicago’s black neighborhoods. And the state of Illinois also moved to remedy some of the social problems addressed by the NFL, establishing a free employment agency that made the NFL’s service obsolete.
After 1916, the NFL faced even more serious competition from yet another philanthropic agency. “It seemed that the Urban League was brought in to supplant the activities of the Negro Fellowship League,” Ida complained in Crusade for Justice. A new branch of a national organization founded in New York in 1911, the Chicago Urban League was, of course, not established to displace existing social service agencies. Rather, like the NFL, it was dedicated to serving the needs of rural black migrants to the urban North. When its organizers won the support of “almost every organization among the women’s clubs,” a far broader base of support than her own organization had ever achieved, Ida was quick to see it as a threat.67 Conceivably the NFL and the Urban League could have collaborated, but Ida ignored the Urban League’s attempts to enlist the support of local black leaders, and soon found her own organization overshadowed. A well-organized and efficient institution, the Urban League was run by a staff of full-time social work professionals. An interracial organization that emphasized social service work over political protest of any kind, it soon won the support of Chicago’s white business leaders and philanthropists, as well as many of Chicago’s leading black citizens. It also had none of the NFL’s public sector liabilities: whereas the federal government regarded Ida’s activities at the NFL as subversive, the Urban League received funding for its employment bureau from the Department of Labor. Housed in the venerable Frederick Douglass Center, which became its permanent home after Celia Parker Woolley’s death in 1918, the Urban League quickly became one of black Chicago’s leading organizations.
