by Mia Bay
Whether Hoover received or responded to the protest is unclear, although he did go on to form a flood relief commission that met with Ida’s approval. Meanwhile, Ida’s outrage over the treatment of the flood victims seems to have inspired her to take a renewed interest in Republican politics. With an eye to local politics, she founded the Third Ward Women’s Political Club. Fueled by her distaste for the corrupt political scene in Prohibition-era Chicago—where bootleggers and politicians collaborated to keep Chicago’s vice districts in business—the club aimed to mobilize women to use their votes to shape local politics, while also training them to run for office. Naturally, one of the first women to run was Ida herself, who competed for a spot as a delegate to the 1928 Republican National Convention. Positioned as an independent candidate seeking representation from the First Illinois Congressional District, she never had a chance. Her opponents included Oscar De Priest and Daniel M. Jackson, two well-known and well-connected black politicians who prevailed easily over Wells-Barnett.
However, the defeat did not discourage Ida from remaining intensely active in Republican politics. An energetic member of the Illinois Republican National Committee, she campaigned for Hoover for president. In particular, her efforts targeted the state’s black women, many of whom had yet to vote in a presidential election. Victorious in Illinois and many other states, Hoover won the election, but like many of the Republican presidential candidates the Barnetts had supported, proved a disappointment in office. He endorsed his party’s plan to rebuild itself in the South by way of “lily-white” organizations designed to pose no threat to the region’s racial status quo.
Turning back to state politics in 1930, Wells-Barnett made one last quixotic effort to secure a political office, competing in the primary for the state senate seat in the third senatorial district. At least in part, Ida’s campaign seems to have been inspired by white Republican Congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick’s successful campaign for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1929. A former ally of black Chicagoans, McCormick had snubbed the entire membership of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs when she employed Washington, D.C.’s Mary Church Terrell to run her campaign’s outreach to female black voters. Illinois’s black club women’s response is recorded in an NACW resolution regretting that McCormick could “find no Negro woman in the state which must elect her, [to work] on her campaign.” Black women must represent themselves, Wells-Barnett seems to have been reminded, when McCormick abandoned her Illinois allies. But at the same time, McCormick’s nomination also testified to the viability of female candidates for Senate seats, although she lost the general election in 1930. Inspired by the prospect, Ida launched her own bid for a seat in the state senate in January 1930, just a few months after McCormick’s nomination.
Quixotic from the very beginning, Wells-Barnett’s campaign received no endorsements from local politicians or political parties. She ran in a black majority district, against competition that included the senate incumbent, Adelbert H. Roberts. In office since 1924, Roberts was the first African American to be elected to the Illinois senate. Formerly a member of the Illinois assembly, he had also served as a clerk for Chicago’s municipal court and had supported Ferdinand Barnett when he protested the East St. Louis riot. His real competition was not Ida, but another black man: the lawyer Warren B. Douglas, who had the support of U.S. Senator Charles Deneen of Illinois—Barnett’s former boss and mentor. Undeterred, Ida collected the five hundred signatures required to compete in the primary, and once again competed as an independent, with fitful support from independent organizations such as the Abraham Lincoln Republican Club. Not surprisingly, she did not manage to secure any endorsements from past political allies, such as Charles Deneen and Edward Wright. Both had loyalties to the most established candidates in the race, and may well have had doubts about a campaign funded largely out of the Barnetts’ increasingly modest household budget.
Among Ida’s few surviving diaries is a “day book” from that era, in which Ida recorded brief notes on the events of her day and the expenses she incurred. It spans a five-month period between January and May 1930, and records just how strained the family budget was during Ida’s Illinois senate campaign. As her book opens in January 1930, Ida looks back on the Christmas season, noting that her daughter “Ida had no coat…neither did[H]erman…so we went nowhere all holiday week. Can’t understand why my folks have no money.”12 Ida seems to have been unwilling to consider an obvious explanation: her campaign expenses loomed large in the budget deficit she repeatedly bemoans in her diary—as her careful record of expenditures makes clear. Ida spent five dollars on petitions that she needed to circulate and submit in order to get her name on the ballot, and seventy-five dollars more on printing thirty thousand cards and letters to promote her campaign, all at a time when she was reduced to paying a girl to help her clean the house “25 cts on account.” Tight finances also required the would-be senator to interrupt her campaign for wash days, and make excuses to friends who wished to call. “I wish I c[oul]d have them stop with me” she writes at one point, “but the house is too dirty & no money to clean.” Ever supportive, and perhaps less perturbed by the messy house, Ferdinand Barnett sponsored the New Deal Paper that his wife published to promote her campaign, printing and distributing twenty thousand copies “at his own expense.”13
In the end, it was all for naught. Ida never made it past the primary, receiving only 752 votes of the more than ten thousand cast. When Adelbert Roberts’s victory was announced, Ida took her defeat coolly, noting cynically in her day book that the incumbent Roberts had the “veteran machine behind him,” which “always wins because the independent vote is weak and unorganized and its workers are purchasable.” What Wells-Barnett hoped to achieve given these odds is not entirely clear, but Ida was never one to avoid a contest because she had no hope of winning. Looking ahead, she hoped to “profit by the lessons of the campaign,” and made a note to “conference with my backers” as soon as she got a chance.14
Perhaps she already had another election in mind. We will never know for sure, since her day book does not go past May 1930, and Ida would die suddenly less than a year later, on March 14, 1931. Four months shy of her sixty-ninth birthday, Wells-Barnett was taken ill after a Saturday morning spent shopping in Chicago’s downtown Loop area. She died four days later of “uremic poisoning”—a condition now usually known as kidney failure. She left behind a shocked and grieving family, headed by her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, who would survive his wife by only five years, dying in 1936.
In the middle of a chapter of her autobiography when she died, Ida was also still contesting racial injustice, as usual. After her senate race, she lent her support to a concerted effort to block the Supreme Court nomination of Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina—a man who believed that “the participation of the negro in politics is a source of evil and danger for both races.”15 Opposed by the Illinois Women’s Republican Club, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Chicago political group known as the Douglass Civil League, the NAACP, and many other black organizations across the country, the Parker nomination threatened to put an end to African Americans’ hopes for recovering their rights in the highest court of the land. But his nomination did not survive the flood of anti-Parker petitions and telegrams that came to Washington from African Americans across the country. As Wells-Barnett had long hoped, in states where African Americans had the vote, the franchise gave them the power to defend themselves. Southern blacks had yet to regain the voting rights that Ida’s father once enjoyed, but a half century of black migrants fleeing the South had combined to create an increasingly powerful black vote north of the Mason-Dixon Line. With African American voters holding the balance of power in upcoming elections in Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, and Indiana, Northern Republicans had to pay attention to black opposition to Parker. His nomination was defeated in the Senate, 41 to 39, in a vote widely recorded as an important victory for the NAACP. But
Ida B. Wells-Barnett played her part in Parker’s defeat and, one hopes, welcomed it as a victory for the “eternal vigilance” she had so long committed to battles to preserve African American liberties.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful and honored to have been able to write about Ida B. Wells, whose life has been an education to me. That education also came thanks to the librarians and archivists at the University of Chicago Library, the Tennessee State Archives, the Chicago Historical Institute, Harvard University’s Widener Library, and the Rutgers University Libraries, who helped me learn about Wells’s life. And likewise, this project owes much to the work of a variety of Wells aficionados, who have collected and edited her writings and written about her life. Her daughter Alfreda Duster was her first archivist and biographer, and preserved an invaluable record of her mother’s life that has served as one of my major sources. I have also learned much from the work of Wells scholars such as Mildred I. Thompson, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Linda O. McMurray, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Hazel Carby, Jacqueline Denise Goldsby, Gail Bederman, Patricia A. Schechter, and Paula J. Giddings.
I am also grateful to Tom Slaughter and Lou Masur for encouraging me to write a biography, and indebted to Thomas LeBien for guiding me through the writing of this book with patience, good nature, and a keen editorial eye. Thanks, too, to Liz Maples and the other folks at Hill and Wang who helped move it to print.
I completed this book thanks to sustained encouragement and support from more colleagues, friends, and family members than I can mention here. Jenny Brier, Kat Hindeman, and Kathryn Tanner hosted me in Chicago during portions of my research. And I worked my way through the challenges of this book in conversation with a wide variety of helpful people. Among them were many friends and colleagues in the history department at Rutgers University, most especially Carolyn Brown, Ann Fabian, Nancy Hewitt, Steven Lawson, Julie Livingston, Temma Kaplan, Minkah Makalini, Donna Murch, Bonnie Smith, Keith Wailoo, and Deborah Gray White. Others include Rebecca Welch, Glenn Loury, Kerwin Charles, Farah Jasmin Griffin, Kimberly Phillips, Michael Hanchard, Patricia Sullivan, Eva Thorne, Martha Jones, David Levering Lewis, Barbara Savage, Waldo Martin, Bill Moses, and Alfred Thomas.
I also received particularly helpful commentary from the 1997–98 research group at the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. Thanks to Keith Wailoo for creating that wonderfully collegial community, which included Nadia Brown, Jeffrey Dowd, Mia Kissil, Dora Vargha, Anantha Sudakar, and Melissa Stein. And double thanks to Melissa Stein for enthusiastic and invaluable research assistance, and to Allison Miller for editorial assistance. I am likewise indebted to Beryl Satter for her careful reading of this book and boundless enthusiasm for its subject.
And finally thanks to my family for love and support, and special thanks to my mother, Juanita Bay, who is always an inspiration to me.
Notes
Introduction: “If Iola Were a Man”
1. Daily Inter Ocean, June 28, 1895.
2. Ibid., 4, 6. Wells quotes these white justifications for lynching in Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892), reprinted in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 59.
3. Ibid., 52.
4. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 69.
5. William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 376.
6. Wells reprints letters from Douglass in Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), which are reprinted in Southern Horrors and Other Writings; he also collaborated on her third pamphlet, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), ed. Robert Rydell (Champaign, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
7. Timothy Thomas Fortune to Booker T. Washington, September 25, 1899, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 5, eds. Louis R. Harlan et al. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 220.
8. Alfreda Duster, “Introduction,” in Wells, Crusade, xxx; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
9. Typescript draft preface version of Crusade for Justice, complete with deletions that are cited here, n.d. The Ida B. Wells Papers, Box 1, Folder 11, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections.
10. Duster, “Introduction,” xxx; Wells, Crusade, 415.
1: Coming of Age in Mississippi
1. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. J. G. Deupree, “The Capture of Holly Springs, Mississippi, Dec. 16, 1862,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 4 (1902): 58.
4. “The emancipated slaves own nothing,” said former Confederate general Robert V. Richardson shortly after the Civil War, “because nothing but freedom has been given to them.” Quoted in Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacies (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1983), 3.
5. Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, “North Carolina Narratives” (Washington, D.C., 1941), vol. 11, part 1, 361, www.gutenberg.org/files/22976/22976-h/22976-h.htm.
6. Wells, Crusade, 8.
7. Ibid., 9–10.
8. Alfreda Duster, interview by Studs Terkel, recorded September 2, 1971, Chicago Historical Society.
9. Wells, Crusade, 8.
10. Duster, interview by Studs Terkel.
11. Rust College was renamed Shaw University in 1870, became Rust University in 1882, and reassumed the name Rust College in 1915.
12. Wells, Crusade, 9.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. The black leader Tyler Williamson was shot and fatally wounded in one such election. Ruth Watkins, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 12 (1912): 172.
16. Wells, Crusade, 9.
17. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 184.
18. An anonymous account of the shooting attempt is cited “on good authority” in Watkins, “Reconstruction,” 179. Exactly in what year it took place is not clear in Watkins or documented elsewhere.
19. Foner, A Short History, 245.
20. Wells, Crusade, 16.
21. “History of Rust College,” quoted in Linda O. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13.
22. Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 78; for discussion of the “consecrated teachers” at Rust, see Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 30.
23. Wells, Crusade, 21.
24. Ibid., 10.
25. On yellow fever, see Edward J. Blum, “The Crucible of Disease: Trauma, Memory, and National Reconciliation during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878,” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 4 (November 2003): 791–820; and Jo Ann Carrigan, “Privilege, Prejudice, and the Strangers’ Disease in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” The Journal of Southern History 36, no. 4 (November 1970): 568–78.
26. Hodding Carter, “A Proud Struggle for Grace, Holly Springs, Mississippi,” in A Vanishing America: The Life and Times of the Small Town, ed. Thomas C. Wheeler (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 72.
27. Wells, Crusade, 11.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 12.
30. Ibid., 15.
31. Ibid., 16.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 17.
34. “Speech of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, March 23, 1900,” Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session, 3223–24,
reprinted in Document Sets for the South in U. S. History, ed. Richard Purday (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1991), 147.
35. Wells, Crusade, 18.
36. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Biography of a Race (New York: Holt, 1993), 69.
37. In her long quest to publicize her mother’s life story, Duster at one point began to fictionalize her mother’s autobiography, adding details that nevertheless seem to be drawn from stories that her mother had told her.
38. Wells, Crusade, 22.
39. Ida B. Wells, “A Story of 1900” (1886), in Memphis Diary, 183.
40. Ibid., 183, 184.
41. Wells, Crusade, 22.
42. Ibid., 21.
43. Wells, Memphis Diary, 24.
44. Fisk Herald, January 3, 1886, 5.
45. Wells, Memphis Diary, 64.
2: Walking in Memphis
1. Linda O. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20.
2. Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 136, 158.
3. Ibid., 26, 61, 59.
4. Ibid., 55, 66, 100.
5. Alfreda Duster, “Last copy of 1st 56 pages of Biography I Wrote,” Chapter 3, n.d., Ida B. Wells Papers, University of Chicago, Box 7, File 3, University of Chicago, Special Collections, 1.
6. Amy G. Ritchter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 45.
