by Mia Bay
“Chicago Disgraced”
The NFL was on its last legs when a thirteen-day riot rocked Chicago during July 1919. The conflagration was one of twenty race riots that erupted in cities and towns across the country during a period later christened “the Red Summer of 1919” by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson. The Red summer took place in an era of global upheaval that saw the Bolshevik revolution transform Russia into a Communist society. In the United States, the postwar period ushered in America’s first “Red scare,” along with a rising tide of racism and xenophobia. Blacks, immigrants, and radicals of all nationalities became the target of suspicion and hostility. Both the Red scare and the Red summer were products of the social and economic conflicts of the era, which saw rising unemployment, renewed labor conflicts, and a national wartime housing shortage.
In Chicago, white soldiers came home to a labor market made newly competitive by the Great Migration, which had all but tripled the city’s black population. The postwar housing shortage that plagued much of the country was particularly acute in Chicago. By 1919, the city’s South Side and West Side black neighborhoods were overflowing, leaving African Americans little choice but to seek housing in white neighborhoods. They were met with intense hostility. Like many whites across the country, white Chicagoans were determined “to reaffirm the Negroes’ prewar status on the bottom rung of the nation’s social and economic ladder”—and maintain the racial boundaries that kept their communities white.68 But in protecting such boundaries, they confronted an African American community made newly militant by the war. Many black veterans came home unwilling to settle for second-class citizenship in “a white man’s country,” and resolved to take up arms to defend themselves against white violence.
Aftermath of the Chicago riot of July 1919
The worst of the urban riots that swept the country that summer, the Chicago riot came as no surprise to Wells-Barnett. Throughout the war, white Chicagoans had policed their city’s racial boundaries with force, attacking African American families that tried to escape the dilapidated and overcrowded housing on the South and West Sides. And by June 1919, the violence had escalated into a rash of antiblack bombings that prompted Ida to lead delegations of concerned citizens to see Mayor William Hale Thompson. When two separate attempts to gain an audience with him failed, she published a letter in the Chicago Tribune imploring the city “to set the wheels of justice in motion before it is too late, and Chicago be disgraced by some of the bloody outrages that have disgraced Saint Louis.”69
After a career spent fighting mob violence, Ida could see what was coming. But she was in no position to stop it. By the end of World War I, Ida’s influence in Chicago had ebbed. Black politicians and organizations such as the Urban League had become the major liaisons between the black community and city, eclipsing Ida’s tiny NFL. Moreover, in an era when all radicals were suspect, Ida was persona non grata in municipal circles—and described in one military investigator’s report as “a far more dangerous agitator than Marcus Garvey.”70
Not surprisingly, then, Ida’s complaint got no response; less than three weeks later, a sunny summer day turned deadly. After several days of temperatures in the nineties, on July 27, 1919, Chicagoans of both races crowded the shores of Lake Michigan. The riot began when a group of black boys began playing in the waters between the black-only Twenty-fifth Street Beach and the white beach beginning at Twenty-ninth Street. As they drifted close to the Twenty-sixth Street breakwater, a white man standing on the shore began to throw rocks at them. One missile struck the black teenager Eugene Williams in the forehead, causing him to lose consciousness and sink. Unable to save their friend from drowning, the other boys called for help, and as both blacks and whites converged on the scene, the conflict quickly escalated. The rioting lasted for five days, killing thirty-nine people and injuring 537 more before several regiments of the state militia finally managed to restore order. The rioters also burned many Chicago homes to the ground, leaving more than a thousand people homeless.
“We lived at 3234 Rhodes, and riots started…only…what you might call a stone’s throw from our house,” Wells-Barnett’s daughter Alfreda later recalled. Her mother went “out every day…to see the people involved.” One of her stepbrothers, who looked white, had to stay inside during the upheaval—“in order to be alive.” But Alfreda felt safe. Her mother still “kept a gun in the house all the time,” and “vowed as in Memphis…that she wasn’t going to die by herself. She wasn’t afraid of dying, she was going to take two or three of them with her.” But fortunately, the riot did not “come close to the [Barnett] house,” which was protected by a “von Hindenberg line” organized by the “colored men east of State Street to repel the [white] hoodlums…reported to be coming over to annihilate Negro citizens.” In all other respects, however, the Chicago riot was an extremely disheartening experience for Wells-Barnett. Ida found herself at odds with other members of a “Protective Organization” founded by local clergymen, who did not share her opposition to leaving the investigation of the riot in the hands of State Attorney General Edward J. Brundage. Brundage had been in charge of the investigation into the East St. Louis riot, and had been woefully ineffectual there. But the ministers ignored her protests. After she resigned from the group, one even murmured, “Good riddance.” She left with angry tears streaming down her face.71
Ida was also sidelined by the local NAACP, which remained cautious and conservative. Walter White, the recently appointed assistant national secretary to NAACP head James Weldon Johnson, traveled from New York to investigate the riots, and found the Chicago branch reluctant to take much action. White also got an earful from Ida when he visited Ferdinand L. Barnett’s office. Furious at the NAACP, Ida “launched into a tirade against every organization in Chicago because they have not come into her organization and allowed her to dictate to them,” White later recalled.72 In the end, the city drew on the Urban League to mediate its relationship with the South Side and supply much of the manpower for the city’s investigation into the riot. The woman who had pioneered the investigative approach to racial violence, Wells-Barnett, had lived to see the day when, in Chicago at least, such work had become the province of organizations rather than individuals; and investigations into racial violence were commissioned by municipal authorities rather than left to muckraking journalists.
The Elaine Massacre
When a wave of renewed racial violence against black sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta in the fall of 1919 attracted little official investigation, Wells-Barnett was drawn back into the fray. The pitched battles that took place in Elaine, Arkansas, pitted black sharecroppers against local whites and federal troops brought in to quell the “race war.” The conflict and its casualties remain hazy to this day. State officials and the local papers covered up the activities of the military and white civilians, describing the Elaine riot as a “negro uprising.”73 However, both NAACP representative Walter White and Ida B. Wells-Barnett recorded a series of extraordinarily brutal white attacks on blacks in Phillips County, where Elaine is located, during October 1919. At issue was not a “black uprising,” but the organization of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union among the county’s sharecroppers earlier that year. The union united sharecroppers across the county in a push for fair compensation for their crops. It addressed the long-standing grievances of black agricultural laborers across the Delta, who were ruthlessly exploited by white landowners. Charged exorbitant rates and refused a fair market price for their shares, sharecroppers saw little profit from their crops even at the end of World War I, when cotton prices reached an all-time high.
The stage for the Elaine massacre was set early that fall when union members—many of whom were World War I veterans—insisted on marketing their own crops in the nearby town of Helena, Arkansas. “We helped you fight the Germans,” organizer Robert Hill stated, “but we want to be treated fairly.” Facing opposition from the planters, they secured a lawyer “to sue for their f
air share of the largest cotton crop in Southern history,” and paid a high price for their ambition.74 On September 30, 1919, a group of armed men arrested Ocier Bratton, a white accountant who was working on the case for his father’s law firm in the nearby town of Ratio, Arkansas. Meanwhile, in Elaine, another group of whites fired on a meeting of union members and their families at the Hook Spur Church. When the black men guarding the meeting fired back, killing one man, the shoot-out became a “negro uprising.”75 Thousands of armed whites descended on Elaine. Among them were 536 troops dispatched by Governor Charles H. Brough of Arkansas. Ordered to disarm both blacks and whites and shoot blacks who refused to surrender their weapons, the troops seemed to have joined forces with the white vigilantes. Armed with military weaponry that included seven machine guns, Arkansas whites overpowered and outnumbered the Phillips County blacks who chose to defend themselves.
All told, five whites died in Elaine, alongside an unrecorded number of blacks—later estimated by Walter White at two hundred and by the Arkansas Gazette reporter Louis Sharpe Dunaway at 856. Both estimates suggest nothing short of a massacre, as does the eyewitness testimony from the riot. One white teacher later reported having seen “twenty-eight black people killed, their bodies thrown into a pit and burned,” as well as the bodies of sixteen African American men strung up on a bridge outside Helena. Two days after the shooting, other Elaine residents noted, “the stench of dead bodies could be smelled two miles.”76 However, the black corpses remained unreported and unacknowledged in the local presses’ accounts of the violence. Instead, papers in Arkansas and other states reported only white casualties, describing the Elaine riot with headlines that blared: “Wholesale Murder of White People May Be Part of Plot Against the South.”77
Arkansas authorities arrested over one thousand black men, women, and children, holding them in a makeshift “stockade” in Helena, while a committee of local whites “investigated” their crimes. The investigation was largely an exercise in labor discipline. To secure his release, each black man had to get a white to vouch for him “as being a ‘good nigger.’ The white man was usually a planter or employer, who would ‘vouch’ only after the Negro had given assurance and ‘guarantees’ as to work and wages.” Even after labor discipline was over, however, 122 black men remained incarcerated on charges of “murder, rioting, conspiracy, etc.”78
The Elaine riot eventually received national attention as a result of the struggles of those prisoners, twelve of whom stood trial for murder. By early December, six were sentenced to death after hasty trials. Among the African Americans to protest the Elaine riot and its aftermath was Wells-Barnett, who challenged the justice of these verdicts. Speaking on behalf of both the National Equal Rights League and the Negro Fellowship League, Ida questioned the crime committed by men “who had defended themselves when fired upon.” She also issued an appeal, published in the Chicago Defender, encouraging black organizations across the country to pool their resources to fund the defense of the twelve prisoners facing capital charges. “Send me the money and I will show you what we can do,” Ida concluded, as feisty as ever. “You furnish me with the sinews of the war and I will fight your battles just as I have done for twenty-five years.”79
But a lot had happened in twenty-five years. Ida was no longer the only African American fighting her people’s battles against racial violence. Fair-skinned, with blue eyes and blond hair, Walter White began his fact-finding tour of Arkansas a few days after the riot. His appearance allowed him to pass for white, a fact that he exploited. Armed with a press pass from The Chicago Daily News, White posed as a white reporter. His ruse allowed him to secure interviews with Governor Brough, sharecroppers’ union attorney Ulysses S. Bratton, and a local black attorney. But his fact-finding trip ended abruptly when local whites got word of a “damned yellow nigger down here passing for white,” forcing White to hop a train just one step ahead of a gathering mob.80 But he was able to piece together the story of the massacre, which he publicized in The Crisis, The Nation, The Chicago Daily News, and other publications. Moreover, White also reported the massacre to the Justice Department, and quietly mobilized NAACP branches across the country to provide legal defense for the Arkansas prisoners, rendering Ida’s later attempts on their behalf largely redundant.
An increasingly powerful organization, by 1918 the NAACP was emerging as the national civil rights organization that Ida and other late nineteenth-century black activists had once been so anxious to organize. But the NAACP’s cautious approach to defending the Arkansas prisoners left little room for old-school black agitators such as Wells-Barnett. She learned of the NAACP’s campaign to free the prisoners when the Defender’s managing editor told her that the organization did not want the paper to publish a subscription list for Wells-Barnett’s legal defense fund, “since the NAACP was already doing all the work necessary in the matter.” The editor also suggested that she simply turn over the money she had already collected to the NAACP, but Ida, with her donors’ support, used the funds “to make an investigation and find out just what the NAACP had done.”81
So in January 1920 Ida returned to the South for the first time in almost thirty years. No less intrepid than Walter White, she sneaked into the Helena prison with the condemned men’s mothers and wives on visitors’ day, posing as a visiting cousin from St. Louis. To the prison guards looking on, the plump and graying fifty-eight-year-old lady was indistinguishable from any of the other “insignificant colored women who had been there many times before.” So they took no notice as she spent “nearly all day Sunday” quietly interviewing the prisoners and encouraging them to fight for their release. Still at home in the religious culture that permeated the rural black South, she shared a message of hope with them that came out of her perennially activist reading of the Bible. “Pray to live and ask to be freed,” she told them, after hearing them sing mournful spirituals. “The God you serve is the God of Paul and Silas who opened their prison gates, and if you have all the faith you say you have, you ought to believe that he will open your prison doors.”82
After she returned to Chicago, Ida published the prisoners’ testimony in a pamphlet titled The Arkansas Race Riot (1922). But how much influence her pamphlet and prison visit had on the legal status of the prisoners is an open question. The NAACP’s small national legal staff, working together with local defense attorneys, secured their release in 1925 with a pathbreaking challenge to Arkansas law, leading to the reversal of the state’s violation of the condemned men’s constitutional rights by the U.S. Supreme Court. A significant legal victory for the NAACP as well as the prisoners, the case opened up later state convictions to new constitutional challenges. Wells-Barnett, however, did not even acknowledge the NAACP’s efforts, instead crediting the success of the prisoners’ legal battle to local attorneys “engaged by the colored people themselves.” Seemingly unaware that these local men were among the several attorneys retained by the NAACP in its five-year struggle to free the prisoners, she recast their release as a community struggle won at least in part as a result of her encouragement. One of the prisoners visited her in Chicago after his release to tell her “how much he felt indebted by my efforts,” she noted. “Mrs. Barnett came and told us to quit talking about dying…and pray to him [God] to open our prison doors, like he did for Silas and Paul,” he told the Barnett family. And “after that…we never talked about dying any more, but did as she told us, and now every last one of us is out and enjoying his freedom.”83
His gratitude should not be discounted, for it suggests that Wells-Barnett’s visit did bring a crucial message of hope. But Ida’s recollection of the legal representation that secured the release of the Arkansas prisoners as having been funded by individual contributions rather than by the NAACP reveals how little she would ever come to appreciate the patient campaign for racial justice that the NAACP began during her lifetime. Still heir to the radical spirit of Frederick Douglass, Ida rejected incremental approaches to social change as
adamantly as the abolitionists who came before her had once rejected gradualist approaches to the abolition of slavery. But no Civil War would come along to end lynching and Jim Crow during her lifetime. Instead, Ida was left to approach old age with nagging questions about whether her long career as an activist had had any lasting impact.
9
Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty
