by Mia Bay
WRITTEN DURING THE LAST FEW YEARS OF HER LIFE AND STILL unfinished when she died in 1931, Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice, is tinged with a bitterness that has helped shape perceptions of her life. Crusade for Justice opens with Ida explaining that she decided to record her story after a young woman told her that while she knew that Wells-Barnett was known as a “heroine” and a “martyr,” she had no idea what the older woman had done to merit this reputation. “Won’t you please tell me what you have done?” she asked her. Ida claims to have taken no offense at the young woman’s request, since “the happenings about which she inquired took place before she was born.” But the four-hundred-page autobiography that Wells-Barnett wrote by way of reply reveals that as she got older she was increasingly troubled to find her long public career was all but forgotten before it had even reached a close. Diagnosed with gallstones in 1920, shortly after the demise of the Negro Fellowship League, she survived what was then a difficult surgery, only to spend the following year bedridden and depressed, wondering whether she “had anything to show for all those years of toil and labor.”1
In the end, she rallied. “It seemed to me that I should now make some preparation of a personal nature for the future, and this I set about to accomplish,” she writes in one of the more cryptic passages in her autobiography. Unfortunately, her text does not go on to illuminate the ambitions that shaped the last decade of her life. Instead, the complete narrative of her life ends around 1920, followed only by an unfinished chapter, which discusses her 1927 challenge to the American Citizenship Federation, a Chicago organization dedicated to defending the ideals of “liberty and patriotism.” The organization’s high ideals did not prevent it from holding a fund-raising dinner at the Drake Hotel, which did not admit colored people, while also inviting the editor of the city’s foremost black newspaper: Robert Abbott of the Chicago Defender. When the organization realized that the African American newsman would not be able to gain admission to the Drake, Abbott was asked to return his invitation, and the dinner proceeded as planned. But when Ida got wind of the story she was furious. “Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty,” she begins a chapter dedicated to detailing the protests that she lodged with Abbott, the Defender, the Drake Hotel, and the American Citizenship Federation. She may have lodged complaints elsewhere as well, but we will never know: her chapter ends in the middle of a sentence.2
A fitting coda to an activist life, Wells-Barnett’s last chapter ended her life as she lived it, still fighting the battles others refused, and often alienating other African American leaders as a consequence—such as Robert Abbott, who did not welcome her intervention into a matter that he had chosen not to protest. Ida contested his choice, insisting that African Americans could never lose sight of “the preservation of our liberties.” Now involved in many “social agencies and activities,” blacks had become dangerously quiet on the subject of racial injustice. She wondered “if we are not too well satisfied to look at our wonderful institutions with complacence…instead of being as alert as the watchman on the wall.” As usual, both the Scriptures and black America’s long freedom struggle guided her reflections. The great abolitionist Wendell Phillips had preached that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”; and in Isaiah 62:6–9 the Lord calls for Jerusalem to be secured by “watchmen on the walls” who “never hold their peace day or night.”3
Wells-Barnett remained among freedom’s watchmen all her life, but she questioned the vigilance of the African American leaders who followed her. In part, her questions reflected her doubts about the emergence of an increasingly organized and powerful African American leadership class, who staffed these “social agencies” and other “wonderful institutions.” Wells-Barnett had fought to create these institutions, but she was uneasy about whether they fostered the aggressive and uncompromising leadership needed to secure and protect black civil rights. She worried that black civil rights leaders had become content to “draw…salaries” instead of engaging in a relentless battle against injustice. Wells-Barnett was activist by lineage and temperament as well as political leanings. For her, institutions were never radical enough. The “restraints of organization” always involved compromises that she could not easily reconcile with her profound commitment to moral, political action—to “do something” about every injustice.4 Forged in the crucible of slavery and emancipation, Wells-Barnett’s uncompromising leadership had come to seem outmoded over the course of her life, leaving her both eclipsed and abandoned by civil rights organizations she had helped create—such as the NAACP.
The NAACP and the NACW
Still, Ida would overcome her hostility to the NAACP long enough to rally around its campaign to pass a federal antilynching measure known as the Dyer bill in the early 1920s. But she remained otherwise an outsider to the nation’s largest civil rights organization, even as it embarked on a long campaign to secure federal legislation against lynching that essentially picked up where her antilynching struggle had left off. The Dyer bill would have mandated federal fines on counties in which lynching occurred. It was designed to make Southern officials who tolerated mob violence accountable for the results—much as the Barnetts had done when they helped to block the reinstatement of Cairo sheriff Frank Davis in 1909. Defeated in the Senate in 1922, the Dyer bill never became law, but the NAACP’s role in shaping and supporting the bill testified to the enduring impact of Ida’s antilynching campaign.
Now the nation’s foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP had appropriated the “template for antilynching activism” that Wells-Barnett pioneered in the 1890s. Much like the short-lived antilynching bureau that Ida had once led under the auspices of the Afro-American Council, the NAACP used investigation, exposure, and relentless publicity to combat mob violence and lobby for antilynching legislation. Moreover, the association also followed Wells-Barnett’s lead in rallying around lynching as a protest issue all the more powerful because it could be used to “draw attention to other racial disparities.” As one historian of the NAACP comments, “at a time when the public refused to honor voting rights, integrated education, equal employment opportunities, open housing, access to public accommodations, or social equality, the NAACP could gain a hearing by showing how violence threatened generally held Judeo Christian and democratic values.”5 Although made without reference to Wells, the comment applies equally to the international antilynching campaign that Ida led in the 1890s, and underscores that her impact on the national civil rights organization cannot be easily overstated.
Indeed, although the NAACP would remain a male-dominated organization for many years to follow, NAACP leaders such as Walter White also followed Ida’s playbook when it came to mobilizing female leaders and women’s organizations in support of its antilynching campaigns. As we have seen, Wells-Barnett single-handedly transformed lynching into a women’s issue. Her antilynching struggle built on her keen insights into the rhetorical challenges and gender politics involved in confronting lynching as a form of racial injustice. Women could be more effective than men, Ida realized early on, when it came to challenging the rape myths that were so often invoked in defense of mob violence. For so long as lynching supposedly protected the virtue of white women, black men could not address the subject without running the risk of sounding self-interested, self-defensive—or both. But black and white women alike could give effective testimony on the evils of burning black men alive in the name of chivalry.
Accordingly, the NAACP enlisted first black women and later white women to support its antilynching initiatives. By the 1930s, it had an interracial coalition of women working on this issue that included the first antilynching group to come out of the white South. Organized in 1930 by the Texas native Jessie Daniel Ames, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) censured the lynchers on their home ground, appealing to Southern white men to abandon lynching “as a menace to private and public safety, and deadly blow at our most sacred instituti
ons.” Moreover, unlike the white female leaders of Wells-Barnett’s day, ASWPL members refused to allow the “perpetrators” of lynching’s “atrocities to hide behind their skirts.”6 Antilynching legislation remained perennially elusive all the same, but the practice of lynching declined steadily over the course of the twentieth century—at least in part as a result of such vocal and widespread opposition.
With the NAACP putting lynching at the top of its agenda even during Wells-Barnett’s lifetime, the world’s first antilynching crusader might well have felt more sanguine about whether she had anything to show for her life’s work. But during the last decades of her life, Wells-Barnett got virtually no public credit for her leadership in defining antilynching as a civil rights cause—or for pioneering protest strategies to draw public attention to mob violence. In many ways the living link between the abolitionist tradition represented by her mentor Frederick Douglass and the twentieth-century civil rights activism of the NAACP, Wells-Barnett was written out of the black protest tradition by a new generation of reformers who appropriated her ideas while rejecting her leadership. As a result, she became deeply suspicious both of the biracial coalition of reformers who led the early NAACP and the middle-class black men who were becoming increasingly prominent in that coalition over time. Her interactions with the NAACP had always been fractious, and her disappointment with the organization only grew in 1919, when Walter White provided no support for her demands for a more thorough investigation into the riot that had devastated black Chicago.
Not content to leave the “preservation of our liberties” to the NAACP or any other organization, Ida would spend the final decade of her life still on watch, but increasingly isolated. No longer at the helm of the NFL, she struggled to find a new forum in a world increasingly unsuited to her leadership style. She did not succeed. But for Ida, “eternal vigilance” was not about success. Sixty years old in 1922, she never considered retiring from public life, even as she bemoaned her diminishing public influence and recognition.
Taken during World War I, this 1917 photograph showcases the whole Barnett dynasty. Standing on the far left is Hulette Barnett, the wife of Albert Barnett (one of Ferdinand’s sons from his first marriage). To her left is Herman Barnett, alongside his stepbrother Ferdinand and siblings Ida and Charles. On the far right is their other stepbrother, Albert Barnett, and sister Alfreda Barnett. Seated are Ferdinand Barnett and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Hulette and Albert Barnett’s four little girls, Beatrice, Audrey, Hulette, and Florence.
As a result, Ida’s last decade was busy. With the exception of her daughter Ida, who lived with her parents even as an adult, the Barnetts’ children were out of the house by the mid-1920s, but visited frequently. Ida welcomed her first grandchild in 1921, when her son Herman had a son of his own. A “fondly hovering” grandmother, she would live to see the birth of three more.7 Her sister Annie Fitts and her husband lived nearby, and were also frequent callers, along with their children. Moreover, Ida kept a close eye even on her children’s adult lives. She saw her youngest daughter, Alfreda, married in 1925, and was plagued with worries about Herman, a lawyer who worked in his father’s office but was perennially penniless due to a weakness for gambling. Ida’s seventy-year-old husband, by contrast, was as hardworking and self-sufficient as ever and continued to make his family’s private household public by bringing clients home for dinner.
For Ida, hosting such guests was more of a challenge than ever. With federal provisions for Social Security yet to be enacted and Ida no longer bringing in an income, the Barnetts’ finances could no longer cover the kind of regular help that had long freed Ida from domestic chores. Now in charge of household tasks she had long been happy to avoid, Ida deeply regretted “the loss [of her] ability and resources to keep the place clean, to keep the house in repair, et cetera”—all of which became more pressing when her husband brought home guests.8 But Ida did not let her domestic responsibilities take over her time. When she could afford it, she still hired local girls to help with housework, and in 1925 she and Ferdinand would conserve their meager resources and reduce their domestic responsibilities by resettling, along with daughter Ida, in a five-room apartment on East Garfield Boulevard.
Even before then, however, Ida kept up her public work. Her interest in the Dyer bill brought her briefly back into the fold of the NACW in 1922. When the organization met in Richmond that year, shortly before the bill’s defeat, Wells-Barnett was on hand to rally support for the measure but found herself completely overshadowed by James Weldon Johnson—a well-known writer, educator, and musician who served as general counsel for the NAACP. Invited to address the NACW on the Dyer bill, Johnson was introduced by a Virginia club woman, Addie Hunton. In doing so, Hunton offered a review of the history of the antilynching movement that credited the origins of the “agitation” against lynching to Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell, Jr.—who wrote a number of late nineteenth-century antilynching editorials but was far less prominent than Wells-Barnett. Worse, Hunton went on to laud Johnson and other members of the NAACP for being the first to pick up Mitchell’s torch. In beginning his own talk, Johnson “was gracious enough to say that one of the national association’s number in the person of Ida B. Wells Barnett had done some work against lynching,” but Ida was not mollified. Even the NACW’s own members’ contributions to antilynching work had begun to be overshadowed by the NAACP’s claims to leadership on the issue, she complained, noting with characteristic sarcasm that “the club women seemed to be happy to cast their own organization as a tail to the kite of the NAACP.”9
Possibly in the hope of changing the NACW’s direction, Wells-Barnett ran for president of the organization at its next biannual meeting in 1924, only to see the powerful and popular club woman Mary McLeod Bethune win 658 of the 700 delegates’ votes. Ida’s landslide defeat was not surprising given that she had never been a regular or particularly popular participant in the association’s organizational life. But she may well have been dismayed to find her once meteoric leadership so completely obscured even in a national organization she had helped usher into being. Like the NAACP, the NACW was dominated by middle-class professionals who had little patience for old-fashioned radicals such as Wells-Barnett. Although no longer as conservative as it was during its early years, the NACW, like the NAACP, embraced painstaking litigation, diplomatic lobbying, cautious leadership, and the careful cultivation of white allies, in preference to noisy protest. Moreover, neither organization showed any interest in commemorating the work of their more controversial and combative founders—leaving Ida increasingly unremembered even in her own lifetime. Like most organizations, both the NACW and the NAACP generated organizational histories that focused on the contributions of members who remained within the fold rather than on the impact of former members whose contributions were fleeting or oppositional.
Wells-Barnett in her sixties
The Watchman on the Wall
Wells-Barnett had spent her life largely outside the fold of any enduring organization, and by the 1920s she had begun to pay the price. Her response was a last-ditch flurry of initiatives that culminated in an unsuccessful campaign for the Illinois state senate in 1930. The impetus for her quest for public office grew out of her continuing involvement in women’s club work, local affairs, and municipal and state politics. The president of the Ida B. Wells Club in 1924, she took on a variety of club responsibilities thereafter, which included involving the club in legal defense work, similar to work taken by the NFL.10 She also became active in the Metropolitan Center, founded by the People’s Community Church of Christ, a new nondenominational church suited to Wells-Barnett’s long-held lack of interest in the niceties of denominational doctrine. There, she founded and led another women’s club, the Women’s Forum, in 1926. Between 1926 and 1927 she also used these organizational ties to support the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ drive to unionize Chicago’s Pullman Company employees.
A national business headquartere
d in Chicago, the Pullman Company supplied sleeping cars and staff to railroads across the country, employing an army of black maids and porters. Underpaid, they made their living largely from tips, and were at the mercy of company policies that required them to supply all passengers with unvarying and obsequiously servile domestic service (until 1927, company policy even dictated that all Pullman porters were to be addressed as “George”). With a third of the company’s traveling labor force living in Chicago, by 1925 the city had become the battleground for a prolonged unionization struggle. Among the challenges the brotherhood faced as it struggled to establish itself in a company town was gaining an audience with Chicago’s black leaders. Largely middle-class and ambivalent about trade unions, many of Chicago’s black leaders hoped to sit out the struggle between the Pullman Company and its employees.
As usual, Ida took a more radical position. Committed to trade unionism and distressed that the brotherhood had received little support from the local press or Chicago’s black leaders, in 1926 she invited A. Philip Randolph, the union’s founder and president, to tell “his side of the story” to her Women’s Forum.11 Further meetings with other black women’s clubs followed, allowing Randolph to educate club women, and ultimately their husbands, on the issues at stake in the brotherhood’s labor struggle—which included securing porters the right to be addressed by names other than George. As a result, by 1927, the brotherhood was able to gain the support of the Chicago Citizens’ Committee, which included many members of the city’s black elite.
That year also saw Wells-Barnett lending her support to investigating and protesting conditions among the thousands of African Americans displaced by the Mississippi flood of 1927. Caused by unusually heavy rains that spring, the flood was a natural disaster of catastrophic proportions that killed more than five hundred people and drove a half million more out of their homes. With twenty thousand square miles of the Delta under water, the summer saw Mississippi blacks fleeing the state in droves, while planters attempted to retain their labor force by impressing black men into work gangs. Even the Red Cross aid supplied to the black refugees was minimal, and disease ran rampant in the makeshift camps that housed them. Working with the Ida B. Wells Club, Wells-Barnett fired off a protest to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, and once again plunged into Republican politics.
