by Cornel West
3. In her autobiography, Wells claims that the lynching in Memphis “changed the whole course of my life.” Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 47 (hereafter cited as Crusade). The three men—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will (Henry) Stewart, whom Wells calls both “Henry” and “Lee”; see Crusade, 47, 64—co-owned and ran a cooperative grocery store, the People’s Grocery, located opposite a white grocery store that had enjoyed a monopoly in the densely populated suburb of Memphis.
4. Like Wells, T. Thomas Fortune was a pioneering journalist and newspaper editor as well as a staunch activist. Fortune founded the Afro-American League in 1890, a more militant precursor of the NAACP, which faltered for lack of funding. For several years, Wells and Fortune supported each other, but their paths diverged in 1898, when Fortune, due to several personal and financial blows, grew more and more desperate and turned to Booker T. Washington for help. Washington then subsidized the New York Age and offered assistance; see Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions; Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 191.
5. It was the Memphis lynching that opened Wells’s eyes: “Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life” (Crusade, 64). But the three men “had committed no crime against white women. This was what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down’” (ibid.).
6. But as her biographer, Paula Giddings, points out, even radically minded Blacks like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, who were highly critical of the imperialist politics of the United States, felt obliged to support Black troops: “Even those like Ida and Ferdinand, who loathed the imperialist impulses that the soldiers carried out in the rebellious Philippines and elsewhere, took pride in their tenacity and courage and supported them with fund-raising parties” (Giddings, Ida, 467). Yet, “Ida and Ferdinand helped organize a mass meeting at Chicago’s Bethel Church to demand freedom for the Cubans and to deplore the killing of the island’s Afro-Cuban military hero, Antonio Maceo y Grajales” (378).
7. The passage referred to builds up toward the experience of violence: “My knowledge of the race problem became more definite. I saw discrimination in ways of which I had never dreamed; the separation of passengers on the railways of the South was just beginning; the separation in living quarters throughout the cities and towns was manifest; the public disdain and even insult in race contact on the street continually took my breath; I came in contact for the first time with a sort of violence that I had never realized in New England; I remember going down and looking wide-eyed at the door of a public building, filled with buck-shot, where the editor of the leading paper had been publicly murdered the day before” (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 15). And, in fact, Du Bois recalled that “lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days,” but it was, indeed, more than a decade later when, in the late 1890s, while he was working as a social scientist at Atlanta University, that the case of Sam Hose affected him deeply (34). It is interesting to note that Wells-Barnett published a pamphlet on the Hose case: Lynch Law in Georgia (1899).
8. As Wells herself puts it in her diary: “I think of my tempestuous, rebellious, hard headed wilfulness, the trouble I gave, the disposition to question his [W. W. Hooper, president of Rust College (formerly Shaw University)] authority.” The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 78.
9. “As I witnessed the triumph of the graduates and thought of my lost opportunity a great sob arose in my throat and I yearned with unutterable longing for the ‘might have been’” (ibid., 78). Wells had been expelled from Rust College for her insubordination, and once she had to earn a living as a teacher, she was not able to continue her formal education.
10. As Patricia A. Schechter puts it in her highly instructive article “‘All the Intensity of My Nature’: Ida B. Wells, Anger and Politics,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 48–77: “Her ‘anomalous’ craving for social autonomy or platonic male friends suggests the limited range of social identities available to single middle-class black women. One was either a wife, a former wife, or a wife-to-be—all else was strange or irregular” (52–53).
11. Giddings, Ida, 69; see also Wells, Crusade, 31. As journalist Lucy Wilmot Smith notes, Wells, who “has been called the Princess of the Press [. . .] believes there is no agency so potent as the press in reaching and elevating a people” (quoted in Crusade, 33). The praise she received by contemporary journalists highlights the fearlessness of her speech. For example, T. Thomas Fortune writes: “She has plenty of nerve and is as sharp as a steel trap” (ibid.).
12. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839) was compiled by Theodore Dwight Weld, one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society; the sisters Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld, staunch Abolitionists and early advocates for women’s rights, contributed to the volume by bearing witness to the cruelties of slavery they had experienced at their father’s plantation in South Carolina.
13. On William Cobbett, see chap. 1, n. 28.
14. On an extended visit to the United States between 1834 and 1836, Harriet Martineau became engaged in the Abolitionists’ fight against slavery, closely observed American society (Society in America, 1837), and reflected upon the methods of social investigations (How to Observe Morals and Manners, 1838). The two books on America established her as a pioneer in sociology avant la lettre.
15. Wells, Crusade, 65–66.
16. See Giddings, Ida, 214. “They had destroyed my paper, in which every dollar I had in the world was invested. They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth. I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth” (Wells, Crusade, 62–63).
17. The Socialist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair investigated the working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry and published his findings at first as a serialized novel in 1905 in the Socialist paper the Appeal to Reason. In a review of the 1906 Doubleday edition, Jack London famously called The Jungle “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery”; repr. in Jack London: American Rebel; a Collection of His Social Writings Together with an Extensive Study of the Man and His Times, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel, 1947), 524.
18. “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892), 70.
19. Robert F. Williams recounts the story of how, in 1957, “a Negro community in the South [in Monroe, North Carolina] took up guns in self-defense against racist violence—and used them” in his book Negroes With Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962), 39, which he wrote in exile in Cuba, from where he broadcast Radio Free Dixie. In the prologue, Williams invokes “an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states prove, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must, act in self-defense against lawless violence,” and claims that “this right holds for black Americans as well as whites.” His example inspired Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Par
ty; see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
20. “I had bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked” (Wells, Crusade, 62).
21. Like Wells-Barnett, William Monroe Trotter, newspaper editor of the radical Boston Guardian, lifelong activist, and cofounder of the Niagara Movement, was known for his fearlessness and militancy. He and Wells-Barnett were often marginalized by more moderate activists. For example, they belonged to the militant faction of the group that prepared the founding of the NAACP, and Du Bois did not think them fit to appear on the list of the Founding Forty.
22. When, in 1909, Wells-Barnett had successfully fought against the reinstatement of a sheriff who had been involved in a lynching in Cairo, Illinois, the Springfield Forum praised her as “a lady in whom we are justly proud” and who “towers high above all of her male contemporaries and has more of the aggressive qualities than the average man” (December 11, 1909, quoted in Giddings, Ida, 487). Yet the common reaction to female aggression or anger expressed in public was repression or defamation. See Schechter, “‘All the Intensity of My Nature,’” which—based on extensive research—highlights the pressure exerted on (Black) female radical activists like Wells, accomplished by an instrumentalization of etiquette that asked women to suppress feelings of rage.
23. In fact, she even published an essay in 1885 on the ideal of “true womanhood,” “Woman’s Mission,” in the New York Freeman, edited by T. Thomas Fortune. As Giddings notes in Ida, her “well-received essay had made her an authority on the subject,” “the nineteenth-century idea of the ideal woman who possessed the Victorian-era virtues of modesty, piety, purity, submission, and domesticity—virtues denied by the conditions that faced black women during slavery and deemed essential to not only their uplift but that of their families, and the community” (12, 86–87).
24. She writes in her diary: “I felt so disappointed for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?” Entry for April 11, 1887, in the unpublished diary of Ida B. Wells, quoted by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster in the introduction to Crusade, xvii.
25. Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
26. See Trudier Harris in her introduction to Wells-Barnett’s Selected Works: “While she was certainly celebrated by blacks, some of them nevertheless painted her as egotistical or as a crazy woman, a loner who did not represent the sentiments of the majority of forward thinking black intellectuals.” Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, compiled with an introduction by Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11.
27. In her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, Wells expresses her critique by juxtaposing her own “radical” political goals with Washington’s policy, a technique that renders the latter downright absurd: “Our policy was to denounce the wrongs and injustices which were heaped upon our people, and to use whatever influence we had to help right them. Especially strong was our condemnation of lynch law and those who practiced it. Mr. Washington’s theory had been that we ought not to spend our time agitating for our rights; that we had better give attention to trying to be first-class people in a jim crow car than insisting that the jim crow car should be abolished; that we should spend more time practicing industrial pursuits and getting education to fit us for this work than in going to college and striving for college education. And of course, fighting for political rights had no place whatsoever in his plans” (265). After the publication of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903, when his critique of Washington was ardently debated among whites and Blacks, the “Barnetts stood almost alone in approving them [Du Bois’s views] and proceeded to show why. We saw, as perhaps never before, that Mr. Washington’s views on industrial education had become an obsession with the white people of this country. We thought it was up to us to show them the sophistry of the reasoning that any one system of education could fit the needs of an entire race; that to sneer at and discourage higher education would mean to rob the race of leaders which it so badly needed; and that all the industrial education in the world could not take the place of manhood” (281).
28. Not only did Wells-Barnett publicly oppose Washington’s lenient attitude toward lynching, but she would also repeatedly criticize him sharply for certain political moves, for example, when in 1900 he launched a new organization, the National Negro Business League, in order to counterbalance the Afro-American Council and its Anti-Lynching Bureau headed by Wells-Barnett (see Giddings, Ida, 423–26). In reaction to Wells-Barnett’s attack in an editorial, Washington’s mouthpiece, secretary Emmett J. Scott, wrote: “Miss Wells is fast making herself so ridiculous that everybody is getting tired of her” (426).
29. Wells-Barnett’s great rival, Mary Church Terrell, a highly educated teacher, journalist, and lifelong activist, also advanced the Black women’s club movement. In fact, according to Angela Davis, “Mary Church Terrell was the driving force that molded the Black women’s club movement into a powerful political group.” Davis, “Black Women and the Club Movement,” in Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 135. Though Davis praises Wells and Terrell as “unquestionably the two outstanding Black women of their era,” she also states that regrettably their “personal feud, which spanned several decades, was a tragic thread within the history of the Black women’s club movement” (136).
30. Mary White Ovington, born to white progressive Unitarians who were active in the struggle against slavery and for women’s rights, was one of the cofounders of the NAACP and served this organization in various functions for thirty-eight years. It was during the founding phase of the NAACP that the two women collided, when Du Bois had taken Wells off the list of the so-called Founding Forty, and Wells felt that Ovington approved of his decision (see Wells, Crusade, 325). Wells settled her account with Ovington by making her responsible for the fact that the NAACP “has fallen short of the expectations of its founders,” because it “has kept Miss Mary White Ovington as chairman of the executive committee. [. . .] She has basked in the sunlight of the adoration of the few college-bred Negroes who have surrounded her, but has made little effort to know the soul of the black woman; and to that extent she has fallen far short of helping a race which has suffered as no white woman has ever been called upon to suffer or to understand” (327–28).
31. Wells devotes a whole chapter (“Chapter VIII: Miss Willard’s Attitude”) of A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (Chicago: privately published, 1895), 138–48, to this battle with the national president of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances E. Willard; see also “A Regrettable Interview,” Wells, Crusade, 201–12. Willard’s voice was a potent one; after all, she headed the era’s largest and most powerful organization of white women. The more harmful for the Black community was her claim that Black men were excessively indulging in both alcohol and sex—and here she “quotes” an anonymous voice from the South—and consequently became an omnipresent threat to Southern women: “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is its center of power. ‘The safety of woman, of childhood, of the home is menaced at a thousand localities at this moment, so that the men dare not go b
eyond the sight of their own roof-tree’” (Wells, Red Record, 142).
32. According to Wells-Barnett, teaching Sunday school turned her life in Chicago into “one of the most delightful periods. I had a class of young men ranging from eighteen to thirty years of age. [. . .] Every Sunday we discussed the Bible lessons in a plain common-sense way and tried to make application of their truths to our daily lives. I taught this class for ten years” (Crusade, 298–99).
33. Jane Addams’s famous Chicago settlement project of Hull House was a great model to Wells-Barnett; in fact, she regarded Addams as “the greatest woman in the United States” (Crusade, 259) and must have been proud to be called the “Jane Addams among Negroes” by a Danish visitor to the United States (Giddings, Ida, 538). However, Wells-Barnett’s admiration for the outstanding social reformer did not prevent her from sharply criticizing Addams for failing to question the common charge of rape in an article that condemned lynching on legal grounds. See Jane Addams, “Respect for Law,” New York Independent, January 3, 1901, and Wells-Barnett’s response, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” Independent, May 1901. Both articles are reprinted in Bettina Aptheker’s unearthing of this dispute, Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of View, by Addams and Wells, occasional papers, no. 25 (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977). See also Maurice Hamington, “Public Pragmatism: Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells on Lynching,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 167–74, which presents this debate as “a wonderful example of public pragmatist philosophy” between the two activists who, despite Wells’s critique, would continue to collaborate “on behalf of civil justice despite their public disagreement” (173).
34. See hooks and West, Breaking Bread.
35. An early experience of a lack of support in the Black community was when, in 1889, she wrote an article in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight about the poor conditions in Black schools while she was still working as a teacher. As a result of her criticism, the school board did not reelect her. “I had taken a chance in the interest of the children of our race and had lost out. The worst part of the experience was the lack of appreciation shown by the parents. They simply could not understand why one would risk a good job, even for their children. [. . .] But I thought it was right to strike a blow against a glaring evil and I did not regret it. Up to that time I had felt that any fight made in the interest of the race would have its support. I learned then that I could not count on that” (Crusade, 37). Wells’s belligerent fight for justice would isolate her throughout her life. As her youngest daughter, Alfreda, remembered: “I’ve seen my mother shed tears after she’d come home from some organization where she worked so hard to try to get change . . . and had met with just obstinate antagonism” (Giddings, Ida, 623). See also Thomas C. Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the 20th Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 39–61, especially 58.
