by Mia Bay
7. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 18.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 91.
10. Wells, Crusade, 19.
11. The Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad v. Ida Wells, Agreed Statement of Facts (March 1885), Tennessee State Library and Archives, 11.
12. Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 324.
13. Ibid., 328; Hall v. Decuir (1877), quoted ibid.
14. Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 278.
15. Joseph Cartwright, The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 106.
16. The Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad v. Ida Wells, Declaration (January 23, 1884), Tennessee State Library and Archives.
17. The Memphis Daily Appeal, December 25, 1884, cited in Wells, Crusade, 19.
18. Wells, Crusade, 19; and Alfreda Duster, interview by Studs Terkel, recorded September 2, 1971, Chicago Historical Society.
19. Wells, Crusade, 19.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Wells, Memphis Diary, 57.
22. Ibid., 66; “Discrimination Case Still Pending,” The Cleveland Gazette, December 11, 1886, 2.
23. Robert T. Shannon, Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee (Louisville, Ky.: Fetter Law Book Company, 1902), 85: 616.
24. Wells, Memphis Diary, 141.
25. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Brook Thomas (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2007), 44.
26. Barbara Y. Welke, “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914,” Law and History Review 13, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 312.
27. Wells, Crusade, 20.
28. Ibid., 21.
29. Wells, Memphis Diary, 141.
30. Ida B. Wells, writing as “Iola,” “Functions of Leadership,” The Freeman (New York), February 7, 1885, reprinted in Memphis Diary, 179.
31. Wells, Memphis Diary, 57.
32. The Indianapolis Freeman, December 2, 1893.
33. Wells, Memphis Diary, 80.
34. Ibid., 38.
35. The Bee (Washington, D.C.), quoted in The Freeman (New York), “Among the People,” December 12, 1885.
36. Wells, Memphis Diary, 80.
37. Ibid., 130.
38. Ibid., 83, 127.
39. Ibid., 44.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 74, 64, 96.
42. Ibid., 82, 52, 101.
43. Ibid., 91, 93.
44. Ibid., 95.
45. Ibid., 97, 96, 95.
46. Wells, Crusade, 25, 26.
47. Wells, Memphis Diary, 96.
48. Ibid., 99.
49. Ibid., 105, 106.
50. Wells, Crusade, 31.
51. Wells, Memphis Diary, 98.
52. On black middle-class sexual mores see Christina Simmons, “African-Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement, 1910–40,” The Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 1 (1993): 51–75.
53. Wells, Memphis Diary, 37.
54. Ibid., 88.
55. Ibid., 37.
56. Ibid., 131.
57. Ibid., 131, 133.
58. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 67.
59. Wells, Memphis Diary, 138.
60. Ibid., 56.
61. Ibid., 39.
62. Ibid., 60.
63. Ibid., 53.
64. Wells, Crusade, 31.
65. Wells, Memphis Diary, 35.
66. Ibid., 36.
67. Ibid., 35–36.
68. Wells, “A Story of 1900” (1886), as reprinted in ibid., 182–84.
69. Ibid., 184.
70. Wells writing as “Iola,” “Functions of Leadership” (1885), reprinted in ibid., 178.
71. Wells writing as “Iola,” quoted in The Freeman (New York), September 12, 1885.
72. Wells writing as “Iola,” “Woman’s Mission,” The Freeman (New York), December 26, 1885; Wells writing as “Iola,” “The Model Girl: A True Picture of the Typical Southern Girl,” The New York Age, February 18, 1888.
73. Wells writing as “Iola,” “Woman’s Mission”; Wells writing as “Iola,” “The Model Girl.”
74. Wells writing as “Iola,” “The Model Girl.”
75. Wells, Memphis Diary, 78.
76. Wells writing as “Iola,” “Our Women: The Brilliant Iola Defends Them,” The Freeman (New York), January 1, 1887.
77. Wells, Crusade, 44.
78. Ibid., 2.
79. Ibid., 32.
80. Weekly Pelican (New Orleans), August 13, 1887, quoted in The New York Age, August 24, 1889.
81. The Indianapolis Freeman, August 24, 1889.
82. Wells, Crusade, 33.
83. Ibid., 36.
84. Ibid., 37.
85. Ibid., 36.
86. Ibid., 43, 44.
87. Ibid., 39.
88. Ibid., 41, 38.
89. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 127.
90. Wells, Crusade, 41.
91. Ibid.
3: The Lynching at the Curve
1. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 48.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 49.
4. The Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis), March 7, 1892.
5. Dennis Brindell Fadin and Judith Bloom Fadin, Ida B. Wells: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Clarion Books, 2000), 41.
6. Wells, Crusade, 51.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 62.
10. Ibid., 55.
11. Ibid., 53.
12. Ibid., 54.
13. Ibid., 55.
14. Ibid.
15. Henry Adams quoted in Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1992), 193.
16. Quoted in Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 42.
17. Free Speech quoted in The Bee (Washington, D.C.), April 13, 1889.
18. Free Speech quoted in The Indianapolis Freeman, June 7, 1890.
19. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 59.
20. Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 102.
21. Quoted in The Weekly Avalanche (Memphis), September 6, 1891.
22. Ida B. Wells, writing as “Iola,” “Judicious Emigration,” The Indianapolis Freeman, November 1896.
23. Frederick Douglass, “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States,” The Journal of Social Science 11 (May 1880): 14. Douglass reiterated his views in 1892 when he reprinted much of this address in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892), 530.
24. Wells, Crusade, 52.
25. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 14.
26. On the story of Charles Lynch, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 21. Other useful overviews of the history of lynching include Waldrep’s The Many Faces of Judge Lynch; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995); and Margaret Vandiver, Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick
, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
27. Rape is described as the “so-called ‘new’ negro crime, by which is meant the crime against white women” in “The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime,” Harper’s Weekly, June 20, 1903, 1050. This description is reiterated in “Some Fresh Suggestions about the New Negro Crime,” Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1904, 120, which notes that “the assault of white women by colored men may fairly be described as the ‘new’ negro crime”; The New York Times, “Mob Law in Arkansas,” February 23, 1892, 4.
28. 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), 65; The Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis), March 22, 1892.
29. The Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis), May 30, 1892.
30. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 65.
31. Wells, Crusade, 72.
32. Ibid., 54.
33. Ibid.
34. Wells, Southern Horrors, 56.
35. Ibid., 56, 61.
36. Wells, Crusade, 65.
37. Wells, Southern Horrors, 58.
38. Ibid., 53.
39. Ibid., 52.
40. Wells, Crusade, 59.
41. Wells quotes the Evening Scimitar in Southern Horrors, 52; Wells, Crusade, 62.
42. Wells, Crusade, 67.
43. Ibid., 61.
44. Ida B. Wells quoted in The American Citizen (Kansas City), July 1892.
45. Wells, Crusade, 62.
46. Ibid.
4: Exile
1. Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875–1930 (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 35.
2. “Miss Ida B. Wells Will Deliver a Lecture” (advertisement), The Bee (Washington, D.C.), October 29, 1892.
3. The 1873 Comstock law (“an Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use”) imposed a federal ban on the circulation of not only erotic literature, but sexual aids and information of any kind—including literature discussing birth control. Margaret Sanger describes the suppression of her women’s magazine under this law in “Comstockery in America,” International Socialist Review (1915), 46–49.
4. Ida B. Wells, “The Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1893), reprinted in Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893–1930 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 186.
5. The Indianapolis Freeman, June 24, 1893.
6. The American Citizen (Kansas City), August 12, 1892.
7. The Indianapolis Freeman, July 16 and August 20, 1892.
8. Detroit Plaindealer, June 17, 1892; The Indianapolis Freeman, July 30, 1892.
9. The Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis), June 30, 1892.
10. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 78.
11. Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 116.
12. Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1997), 189.
13. Wells, Crusade, 79.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 78, 79.
16. Ibid., 79.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 82.
19. Wells, “The Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” 176.
20. Wells, Crusade, 80.
21. Quote in Darlene Clark Hine, “The Corporeal and Ocular Veil: Dr. Matilda Evans and the Complexity of Southern History,” The Journal of Southern History 70 (February 2004): 26.
22. Patricia A. Schechter, “‘All the Intensity of My Nature’: Ida B. Wells and African-American Women’s Anger in History,” Radical History Review 70 (October 1998), 57.
23. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 139.
24. Ibid., 85.
25. Ibid., 91.
26. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2005), 29, 335.
27. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 917.
28. Cooper, Voice from the South, 32.
29. Wells, Crusade, 21.
30. Ibid., 80.
31. Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 102.
32. Ida B. Wells, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World Columbian Exposition (1893), 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), 50.
33. Ibid., 61.
34. Wells, Crusade, 71.
35. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 65.
36. 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), 53, 55.
37. Ibid., 54.
38. Ibid., 59.
39. Ibid., 71.
40. Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 147.
41. Wells, Southern Horrors, 58.
42. Ibid., 54.
43. Patricia Schechter, “Unsettled Business: Ida B. Wells against Lynching or How Antilynching Got Its Gender,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 301.
44. Wells, Crusade, 72.
45. Ida B. Wells to Frederick Douglass, October 17, 1892, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
46. Frederick Douglass’s letter, October 25, 1892. The letter appears at the beginning of Southern Horrors, 51.
47. Frederick Douglass, “Lynch Law in the South,” North American Review 155 (July 1894): 17–24.
48. Ibid., 23.
49. Francis Grimke, “The Second Marriage of Frederick Douglass,” The Journal of Negro History 19, no. 3 (July 1934): 324–29.
50. Wells, Crusade, 73.
51. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 28, 29.
52. The Indianapolis Freeman, November 26, 1892.
53. The New York Times, February 2, 1893.
54. The Sun (New York), February 2, 1893.
55. Wells, Crusade, 84.
56. The New York Times, February 2, 1893; The Washington Post, February 2, 1893; The Washington Post, February 5, 1893.
57. Wells, Crusade, 84.
58. “Invited to Attend a Lecture on Lynching,” The Washington Post, January 29, 1893.
59. Grace Elisabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Random House, 1999), 207.
60. Wells, Crusade, 85.
61. The Times (London), February 8, 1893, 5.
62. Catherine Impey, “To My Dear Friends,” March 21, 1893, Albion Tourgée Papers, quoted in Linda O. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 186.
63. Wells, Crusade, 85.
64. Tourgée quoted in Mark Elliott, Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 239, see also 241; Catherine Impey, “A Lynching Scene in Alabama,” Anti-Caste 6 (January 1893): 1.
65. Wells, Crusade, 86.
66. The Memphis Commercial, December 15, 1892.
67. The Cleveland Gazette,
February 11, 1893. See also The American Citizen (Kansas City), February 25, 1893; McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 177–78.
68. Topeka Weekly Call, January 8, 1893, M 181.
69. Ida B. Wells to Albion Tourgée, n.d., Ida B. Wells Papers, Box 10, Folder 6, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections.
70. Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 207; “Do You Know?” Chicago Defender, July 10, 1943.
71. Davis, The Negro Newspaper, quoted in McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 238.
72. Ferdinand Barnett to Albion Tourgée, February 23, 1893, Ida B. Wells Papers.
73. Ida B. Wells, “The 1893 Travel Diary,” in The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 162.
74. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), 177.
75. G. R. Simpson, “Notes,” The Journal of Negro History 10, no. 1 (January 1925): 104.
76. Ware, Beyond the Pale; Sandra Stanley Holton, “Segregation, Racism and White Women Reformers: A Transnational Analysis, 1840–1912,” Women’s History Review 10, no. 1 (2001): 5–25.
77. Sarah L. Silkey, “Redirecting the Tide of White Imperialism: The Impact of Ida B. Wells’s Transatlantic Antilynching Campaign on British Conceptions of American Race Relations,” in Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change, eds. Angela Boswell and Judith N. McArthur (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 100.
78. “The Lynching at New Orleans,” The Times (London), March 17, 1891, p. 5.
79. Anti-Caste 3, no. 1 (January 1890): 3, cited in Caroline Bressey, “A Strange and Bitter Crop: Ida B. Wells’ Anti-Lynching Tours in Britain, 1893 and 1894.” Centre for Capital Punishment Studies, Occasional Papers 1 (December 2003), www.wmin.ac.uk/law/pdf/CBressey.pdf.
80. Terence Finnegan, “Lynching and Political Power in Mississippi and South Carolina,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 197.
81. Anti-Caste 3, nos. 7 and 8 (July and August 1890): 4, quoted in Bressey, “A Strange and Bitter Crop.”
82. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895), www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm.
83. Carolyn L. Karcher, “Ida B. Wells and Her Allies Against Lynching: A Transnational Perspective,” Comparative American Studies 3, no. 2 (2005): 141.
