by Mia Bay
42. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), 210.
43. Wells, A Red Record, 118.
44. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 82.
45. Wells, A Red Record, 80.
46. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 11.
47. Wells, A Red Record, 154–55.
48. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xx–xxi.
49. Wells, Crusade, 230.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 238, 255.
52. “Although a Busy Woman, She Has Found the Time to Marry,” Idaho Daily Statesman, August 8, 1895.
53. Daily Inter Ocean, June 28, 1895.
54. Wells, Crusade, 240.
55. Ibid., 239.
56. Ibid., 241.
57. Ibid., 255.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 255, 242.
60. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 132; on Mary Graham Barnett see “Colorful History of Early Chicago,” Chicago Defender, December 31, 1932.
61. Stella Reed Garnett, “A Chapter in the Life of Ida B. Wells,” unpublished manuscript, April 25, 1951, manuscript 5, enclosed in Stella Reed Garnett to Alfreda Duster, April 26, 1951, Ida B. Wells Papers.
62. The American Lawyer 5, no. 4 (April 1897): 184.
63. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 129.
64. Wells, Crusade, 164.
65. Ibid., 122.
66. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 126.
67. The Indianapolis Freeman, September 7, 1895.
68. Carolyn A. Waldron, “‘Lynch-law Must Go!’: Race, Citizenship, and the Other in an American Coal Mining Town,” The Journal of American Ethnic History 20, no. 1 (October 2000).
69. “Editorial Comments,” The Atlanta Constitution, August 20, 1895.
70. Jacks’s letter is reprinted in “A Base and Infernal Slander,” The American Citizen (Kansas City), July 12, 1895.
71. Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 21.
72. “Colored Women and Miss Willard,” The New York Times, August 1, 1895.
73. Margaret Murray Washington and Fannie Barrier Williams quoted in Salem, To Better Our World, 21.
74. The Woman’s Era 2 (August 1895): 16.
75. “P.G.,” quoted in Richard T. Greener’s typescript report of the conference, Rare Book Room, Boston Public Library.
76. The Woman’s Era 2 (August 1895): 14.
77. Salem, To Better Our World, 22.
78. Wells, Crusade, 243.
79. Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 150.
80. Wells, Crusade, 243.
81. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 127.
82. Wells, Crusade, 251.
83. Ibid., 248–49.
84. Ibid., 251.
85. Ibid., 250.
86. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 128.
87. Wells, Crusade, 249.
88. Ibid., 249–50.
89. Salem, To Better Our World, 23.
90. Wells, Crusade, 260.
91. Teresa Blue Holden, “‘Earnest Women Can Do Anything’: The Public Career of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1842–1904,” Ph.D. dissertation, Saint Louis University (2005), Chapter 5.
92. Wells, Crusade, 230.
93. Ibid.
94. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 127.
7: Challenging Washington, D.C.—and Booker T.
1. Alfreda Duster, interview by Studs Terkel, recorded September 2, 1971, Chicago Historical Society.
2. This phrase comes from Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), which first came out under the title The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901.
3. Ibid., 313.
4. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Brook Thomas (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 1997), 57.
5. “The S.C. Post Offices: No Democrat Need Hope If a Republican Applies,” The State (Columbia, S.C.), November 4, 1898; “The Murder of Postmaster Baker,” The Cleveland Gazette, February 26, 1898.
6. “Murder of Postmaster Baker.”
7. Loftin survived the assault. But whites in his small Georgia town eventually drove him out of office by delivering their mail to the railway trains that passed through the town rather than patronizing the post office. “Negro Postmaster Retires,” The Dallas Morning News, February 26, 1898, 2; “Forcing Loftin Out: The Colored Postmaster at Hoganville, Ga., Making but 11 Cents a Day,” The Sun (Baltimore), February 5, 1898, 6.
8. “Lake City, S.C., Postmaster Baker,” reprinted in The State (Columbia, S.C.), April 12, 1898.
9. “Ida B. Wells’s Petition on Behalf of Frazier Baker’s Wife and Children, 1898,” Lynching in America: A History in Documents, ed. Christopher Waldrep (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 210.
10. The News and Courier (Charleston, S.C.), April 21, 1899, quoted in “The Lynching of Postmaster Frazier Baker and His Infant Daughter Julia in Lake City, South Carolina, in 1898 and Its Aftermath,” www.usca.edu/aasc/lakecity.htm.
11. Benjamin R. Justesen, “Black Time, White Iceberg: Black Postmasters and the Rise of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1897–1901,” The North Carolina Historical Review 82, no. 2 (April 2005): 225.
12. Marvin Fletcher, “The Black Volunteers in the Spanish-American War,” Military Affairs 38, no. 2 (April 1974): 48.
13. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 254.
14. Ibid.
15. Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
16. Wells, Crusade, 256.
17. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 111, 112.
18. Ibid., 112.
19. Ibid., 113.
20. Shawn Leigh Alexander, “‘We Know Our Rights and Have the Courage to Defend Them’: The Spirit of Agitation in the Age of Accommodation,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2004).
21. Wells-Barnett quoted in Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 253.
22. “Hisses—Groans,” The Cleveland Gazette, January 7, 1899.
23. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 230.
24. Ibid., 226.
25. “B. T. Washington on Lynching,” The New York Times, April 26, 1899.
26. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lynch Law in Georgia (Chicago: Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899), 1.
27. Booker T. Washington quoted in Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 263.
28. Timothy Thomas Fortune to Booker T. Washington, September 25, 1899, in The Booker T. Washington Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 5:220.
29. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, vol. 2, The Wizard of Tuskegee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
30. Quoted in McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 259.
31. Booker T. Washington to Emmett Jay Scott, July 21, 1900, BTW Papers, 5:589.
32. Emmett Jay Scott to Booker T. Washington, August 13, 1901, BTW Papers, 6:186.
33. For biographical details on Robert Charles, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).
34. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans, reprinted in Southern Horrors and Other Writings, ed. Jacqueli
ne Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 164–65.
35. “Constitution of the State of Louisiana, Adopted May 12, 1898,” in Documentary History of Reconstruction, ed. Walter L. Fleming (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 2:451–53.
36. Hair, Carnival of Fury, 146.
37. “Murderer Charles Shot to Death,” The New York Times, July 28, 1900; “The New Orleans Riot,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 29, 1900.
38. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 192.
39. Ibid., 169, 193.
40. Ibid., 202.
41. Ibid., 198.
42. Ibid., 164, 166, 202.
43. Quoted in ibid., 202. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 57.
44. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 202.
45. William Monroe Trotter, The Boston Guardian, July 19, 26, 1902; Alexander, “‘We Know Our Rights,’” 277.
46. “For the Negro,” Friends Intelligencer, January 17, 1903.
47. Ida B. Wells-Barnett to W.E.B. Du Bois, May 30, 1903, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1877–1934, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 56.
48. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston (New York: Scribner, 1971), 20.
49. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of Today. (New York: J. Pott & Co., 1903), 10.
50. Raymond Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 61.
51. Fox, Guardian of Boston, 27.
52. Ibid., 32, 39.
53. Ibid., 52, 39.
54. Alexander, “‘We Know Our Rights.’”
55. Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, 249, 319.
56. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 302; Fox, Guardian of Boston, 62.
57. Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals, 75.
58. Du Bois, “The Parting of the Ways” (1904), cited in Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 309.
59. Ida Wells-Barnett, “Booker T. Washington and His Critics” (1904) in Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893–1930 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 256.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 257.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 257, 256, 259.
64. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 306–307.
65. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 271.
66. “Barnett Appeals for Judge’s Seat,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 19, 1906; “Canvass of Votes Defeats Barnett,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 23, 1906.
67. “Figures Indicate Barnett’s Defeat,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 21, 1906.
68. “Barnett to Take Bench,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 9, 1906.
69. “Tillman Speaks: The Negro Is His Topic,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 28, 1906.
70. Wells, Crusade, 279.
71. Allen H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of the Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 104.
72. Wells, Crusade, 283.
73. Julius Taylor, The Broad Ax (Chicago), June 23, 30, July 7, 1906, quoted in Mc-Murray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 275.
74. Wells, Crusade, 284–85.
75. Ibid., 286, 285, 287.
76. At least one and possibly both men were innocent of the crimes with which they were charged. Joe James, an Alabama drifter, was convicted and executed for the miner’s murder, but on very dubious evidence. The alleged rapist, a hod carrier named George Richardson, was exonerated two weeks after the riot when Mabel Hallem, the woman whose rape charges sparked the riot, dropped her charges against him. She later admitted that she had never been raped. Roberta Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 19, 167, 158.
77. James L. Crouthamel, “The Springfield Race Riot of 1908,” The Journal of Negro History 45, no. 3 (July 1960): 170.
78. “Negroes’ Hopes in Iron Laws,” Chicago Tribune, August 16, 1908.
79. William English Walling, “The Race War in the North,” The Independent, September 3, 1908, 530.
80. “The Call,” The Nation, February 12, 1909.
81. Ida Wells-Barnett, Proceedings of the National Negro Conference (New York: The Conference, 1909), 173.
82. Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
83. Mary White Ovington, “The National Association of Colored People,” Journal of Negro History 9, no. 2 (April 1924): 111.
84. Elliott M. Rudwick, “Booker T. Washington’s Relations with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” The Journal of Negro Education 29, no. 2 (spring 1960): 134.
85. Wells, Crusade, 323.
86. Mary White Ovington, Walls Come Tumbling Down (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 106; Elliott M. Rudwick, “The National Negro Committee Conference of 1909,” The Phylon Quarterly 18, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter, 1957): 417.
87. Wells, Crusade, 325.
88. Ibid., 327–28; Ovington, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 106.
89. McMurray, To Keep the Waters Troubled, 281.
90. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 400.
91. Ibid., 399.
92. Ibid., 415, 421.
93. Wells, Crusade, 328.
8: Reforming Chicago
1. “Cairo Mob Kills 2,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1909.
2. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 311.
3. “Suppression of Mob Violence Bill, May 16, 1905,” quoted in Stacy Pratt McDermott, “‘An Outrageous Proceeding’: A Northern Lynching and the Enforcement of Anti-Lynching Legislation in Illinois, 1905–1910,” The Journal of Negro History 84, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 62.
4. Wells, Crusade, 311.
5. Ibid., 311–12.
6. Thomas Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, eds. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 39–61.
7. Wells, Crusade, 312.
8. Ibid., 312, 313.
9. McDermott, “‘An Outrageous Proceeding,’” 65.
10. Wells, Crusade, 315, 316.
11. Ibid., 318.
12. “Sheriff Pays for Lynching,” The Atlanta Constitution, December 7, 1909.
13. McDermott, “‘An Outrageous Proceeding,’” 75.
14. Wells, Crusade, 298.
15. Ibid., 299.
16. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” in The Black Women’s Oral History Project, ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill, vol. 3 (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1991), 133.
17. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 48.
18. Ibid.
19. “Interview with Alfreda Duster,” 137; Wells, Crusade, 300.
20. Ibid., 303.
21. Wells-Barnett quoted in Spear, Black Chicago, 46–47.
22. Ibid., 301.
23. Ibid., 303.
24. Ibid., 304.
25. Ibid.
26. “Negro Fellowship League’s House Warming,” Chicago Defender, April 10, 1910, 1.
27. Lucius C. Harper, “We Should Pause to Pay Respect to Negro Heroes,” Chicago Defender, February 9, 1946.
28. “Slayer, in Grip of Law Fights Return to South,” The Washington Post, October 21, 1910, 11.
29. Or so Wells-Barnett reports, but her memory may not be accurate. Green is quoted in The Washington Post as saying, “I tried to kill myself by eating the heads off matches. It did not kill me but only made me sick.” Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Wells, Crusade, 336, 337.
32. Ibid., 304.
33. Ibid., 332.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid. See also Robin F. Bachin, Building the South Side: U
rban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 261–62.
36. Wells, Crusade, 331.
37. Ibid., 331, 357, 358.
38. Anne Meis Knupfer, Reform and Resistance: Gender, Delinquency, and America’s First Juvenile Court (New York: Routledge, 2001), 52.
39. Ibid.
40. Wells, Crusade, 346.
41. “Illinois Women Feature Parade,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1913.
42. Ibid.
43. “Illinois Women Participants in Suffrage Parade,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1913.
44. Wells, Crusade, 352.
45. Ibid., 333.
46. Ibid., 341.
47. “The Ordeal of the Solitary,” Chicago Defender, June 26, 1915.
48. “Innocent Man Freed from Penitentiary,” Chicago Defender, May 4, 1918.
49. Wells, Crusade, 335.
50. “Appomattox Club Kills ‘Jim Crow’ Bills in the State of Illinois,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1913.
51. “Ida B. Wells-Barnett Scores Tribune—Disregards Race,” Chicago Defender, May 9, 1914.
52. “Marshall Field & Co. Discharge Saleswoman Who Insults Afro-American,” Chicago Defender, June 20, 1914.
53. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (January 1993): 75–112.
54. Alfreda Duster in Dorothy Sterling’s, “Afterword,” in The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 196.
55. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston (New York: Scribner, 1971), 140.
56. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Year 1913 in Account with Black Folk,” The Crisis 7 (January 1914): 133–34.
57. Quoted in Mark Ellis, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Formation of Black Opinion in World War I: A Commentary on ‘The Damnable Dilemma,’” The Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995): 1585.
58. “Help the Soldier Boys to Have a Merry Xmas,” Chicago Defender, December 15, 1917.
59. Wells, Crusade, 390.
60. “Printed Address by Marcus Garvey on the East St. Louis Riots,” in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 213.
61. Ibid., 213, 218.
62. “Lawyer Warns Negroes Here to Arm Selves,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1917.
