by Karen Branan
When she published an article on this subject, her newspaper office was incinerated and Wells and her co-owners were run out of town, warned that there’d be a rope waiting if they returned. From her new home in Chicago, she continued to publish well-researched reports, many for the Chicago Tribune, which exposed the truth behind lynchings. Wells took to the road throughout the United States and England to form antilynching leagues and, while in Britain, called for boycotts of southern textiles.
Columbus, a major textile manufacturing center, kept a close eye on Wells and its two dailies occasionally printed her speeches on their front pages. She was no less hated by the white northern press: a New York Times editorial once called her a “nasty-minded mulatress” for suggesting white women might consciously consort with black men, who, the Times assured readers, were “naturally prone to rape.”
The antagonism of white Georgians toward the now-married Ida B. Wells-Barnett spiked in 1897 when she sent a white Pinkerton detective to Newnan, a short way from Harris County, to investigate the famous Hose-Strickland lynching. His report revealed that while Sam Hose had killed a white farmer, either in self-defense or in a moment of rage at being denied permission to visit his dying mother, the farmer’s wife had not, as widely reported, been raped on a floor covered in her husband’s blood—had not, in fact, been raped at all. That rumor, given credence by the mainstream press, had created enough rage to bring two thousand people (many of them on specially scheduled trains) to participate in a savagery in which Sam Hose was barbecued and his body parts widely distributed.
When Wells-Barnett’s heroic efforts to stop lynching bore little fruit, she counseled blacks to equip their homes with Winchester rifles until they could save enough to abandon the South, provoking additional antagonism by white southerners.
While Wells-Barnett’s activities were grabbing headlines, another outspoken black woman, Anna Julia Cooper—a cousin to my Williams family—wrote A Voice from the South, which excoriated white slave owners, explaining all the ways they had debilitated black people, continued to play them against one another, and contributed to their downfall.
I discovered my connection to Cooper in a most unexpected way, while looking for black women of this period who’d spoken out against the sexual predations of white men. I found her 1886 plea for the protection of “the colored girls of the South” who live “in the midst of pitfalls and snares, waylaid by the lower classes of white men with no shelter, no protection nearer than the great blue vault above.” Something told me to look into her background and I quickly learned from her own writings that she was the daughter of an enslaved woman and her owner, George Washington Haywood. From my research into old Williams letters at the University of North Carolina, I knew he was a cousin.
Anna Julia Cooper was the granddaughter of Eliza Eagles Haywood, who had published erudite tracts with the Raleigh Tract Society, and in the late 1700s mused in a journal whether, if given the chance, women and Negroes might not be as capable as white men. At age nine the precocious Anna Julia had been sent to St. Augustine’s, a school started by white Episcopalians for freed children on grounds formerly part of a Haywood plantation. She’d learned to read at an early age and within a few years was teaching other children; upon graduation, she enrolled at Oberlin College, where she’d become the second woman to insist on taking the male course. Married and widowed early, now named Cooper, she returned to Raleigh to teach at St. Augustine’s and to make a name for herself as a popular speaker. In A Voice from the South, which was published in 1892 and won praise across the color line, Cooper mounted a line of attack on white southerners, which surely caught the eyes of her prideful Lost Cause cousins:
Without wealth, without education, without inventions, arts, sciences, or industries, without well-nigh every one of the progressive ideas and impulses which have made this country great, prosperous and happy, personally indolent and practically stupid, poor in everything but bluster and self-esteem, the Southerner has nevertheless with Italian finesse and exquisite skill, uniformly and invariably so manipulated Northern sentiment as to succeed sooner or later in carrying his point and shaping the policy of this government to suit his purposes.
Continuing this previously unheard-of line of public attack on white supremacists by a black woman, she added wryly, “If your own father was a pirate, a robber, a murderer, his hands are dyed in red blood and you don’t say very much about it. But if your great-great-great-grandfather’s grandfather stole and pillaged and slew and you can prove it, your blood has become blue and you are at great pains to establish the relationship.”
This would have enraged the Beall-Williams clan in Hamilton, whose greatest pride was their ancestors’ military legacy, just beneath the surface of which lay slaughter, plunder, and pillage of countless numbers of Native American and African peoples.
In 1892 Anna Julia stood before a teeming crowd at the World’s Convention of Women in Chicago and spoke against white men’s predatory behavior toward black women.
The painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a fee simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the despairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish material for epics. That more went down under the flood than stemmed the current is not extraordinary. The majority of our women are not heroines—but I do not know that a majority of any race of women are heroines. It is enough for me to know that while in the eyes of the highest tribunal in America she was deemed no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither or thither at the volition of an owner, the Afro-American woman maintained ideals of womanhood unshamed by any ever conceived. Resting or fermenting in untutored minds, such ideals could not claim a hearing at the bar of the nation. The white woman could at least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent. I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny is evolving.
Her well-received book and the Chicago speech catapulted Cooper into the international spotlight. Of her presentation and others at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago in 1893, Frederick Douglass remarked from the audience, “When I hear such speeches . . . from our women—our women—I feel a sense of gratitude to Almighty God that I have lived to see what I now see.”
At the Exposition and in her book, Anna Julia Cooper established herself as the nation’s first black feminist by asserting that black women, because they had endured more, suffered more, survived more, had more to teach black and white men and white women than the reverse. She was talking to black people about the schemes of white folks to divide and demoralize blacks; she used her “inside knowledge,” her excellent education, and her fine mind to unmask and humiliate them.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, as the name Anna Julia Cooper continued to pop up in the Washington Post and the Atlanta Constitution as a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, the larger Williams-Haywood family undoubtedly squirmed at any possibility this brilliant, accomplished, though, alas, “black” scholar, orator, and leader might in some way attach herself to them. This sort of potential reckoning haunted a wide sector of white men and women in the South. Some of the Haywood family sought to exorcise the threat by burning copies of her book, which had been sent to them anonymously. As for the ever-polite and ladylike Cooper, not once did she express public disdain for her white family, though in private papers she wrote “My mother was a slave and the finest woman I have ever known . . . presumably my father was her master, if so I owe him not a sou, And she was always too modest and shamefaced to ever mention him.”
By the 1890s the Williams family was well entrenched in Columbus society. Ben was a state senator
and his brother Charles, a prominent physician, headed the Georgia Medical Society. One of Ben’s wife’s Beall cousins was married to a man of great influence in the city, William Young, president of Eagle & Phenix Mills. Another cousin was married to the brother of Gunby Jordan, the city’s most influential industrialist and banker. An elegant section of Columbus had been named Beallwood. Ben’s son and brother had fine homes in another upscale section, south of downtown, along the river near where General Beall had first laid out the city. Because of the populist diatribes against the rich, wealthy people at the time avoided the limelight. Certainly they did not want it known their ancestors had spawned black children now educated beyond their own and speaking to an international audience about the crimes of the white fathers.
Anna Julia Cooper was not the only offspring of slave and slave master who’d set white relatives’ teeth on edge. In Wilmington, North Carolina, Alex Manly, believed to be a descendant of former North Carolina governor Charles Manly, a Haywood cousin, published the Daily Record, the only daily black newspaper in the world. In 1898 Manly took up a prominent Ida Wells theme: “Every negro lynched is called a Big Burly Black Brute,” he, or possibly a staffer, wrote in the Record, “when in fact many of those who have been dealt with had white men for their fathers and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is very well known to all.”
In 1897, in a burst of anger at Georgia newspaper columnist Rebecca Felton, who’d gained national attention with her diatribes against black rapists, calling for “a lynching a day if that’s what it takes,” Manly wrote of the white men of North Carolina: “You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites; in fact you cry aloud for the virtue of your women, while you seek to destroy the morality of ours. Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours. You sow the seed—the harvest will come in good time.” The intemperate remark became the perfect pretext for the armed takeover of government already planned by former congressman Alfred Waddell, yet another Haywood cousin, and a committee of Wilmington’s most powerful whites, including Uncle Alfred Williams’s granddaughter’s husband, Preston Bridgers, who acted as its chief fund-raiser.
At a planning meeting in the Municipal Auditorium, Waddell and his men decried the large numbers of blacks and Radical whites in city offices, reeled off lists of petty humiliations whites endured each day at the hands of black officials, determined they would have all blacks in the state disfranchised, plotted to drive out the city council, and made lists of blacks and whites targeted for removal. Using Manly’s editorials to bring white ruffians in the streets to fight blacks, the men fomented their “riot.”
On November 10, 1898, Waddell led a mob of four hundred “Red Shirts” into a black Wilmington neighborhood, entered Manly’s newspaper building, smashed its presses, and burned it to the ground. Manly’s light skin had allowed him to escape the city earlier, but large numbers of successful, educated blacks, already carefully chosen for exile, were rounded up and marched to the depot. Twenty-five others were killed, including the white Republican deputy sheriff. This was followed by days and nights of all-out warfare. In the end, the hard-wrought gains of freed blacks were almost entirely destroyed and thousands of lives had been wrecked. Far and wide in the white world, the defenders of white womanhood were lionized and the black editor Alex Manly was blamed. Undaunted, Manly served briefly in the office of Congressman George White, a black North Carolinian, writing civil rights legislation; but the remainder of his life was plagued with failure.
In the meantime, Anna Julia Cooper had begun to make public pronouncements decrying mobs and speaking specifically about the Hose lynching, calling the mob “hyenas.” She also had choice words about the Wilmington riots and murders—with no mention, however, of her white relatives’ involvement. At a 1902 Quaker conference, Cooper blasted President Theodore Roosevelt and his attorney general for bringing “no federal aspects” to the lynching mania. By now she was living in Washington, D.C., where as principal of the M Street School, she was attracting attention for her success at sending black students to Ivy League colleges. She was the only woman invited to join the American Negro Academy, a circle of prominent black intellectuals, including Du Bois.
In 1904, Mary Church Terrell, a black woman who’d achieved an even larger public presence than Cooper, her neighbor and colleague in Washington, D.C., and who was now honorary president of the National Association of Colored Women, published an antilynching article in the North American Review. In it she blasted white ministers for their silence on and sometimes support for lynching, saying that the practice was converting white southern women and children to savages. She blamed whites’ hatred of blacks and a general state of lawlessness of the South. She took up one of Cooper’s major themes, the invasion of Negro homes by white “gentlemen” who consider “young colored girls” their “rightful prey.”
If white Hamilton was listening, and by now they were hyperalert to the subversive outcries of “the enemy,” their ears were burning.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Race Wars
Sex between white men and black women in the South was taboo before 1906, but the Atlanta riot of that year—a watershed event for race relations—thrust the subject into national prominence. During a four-day carnival of mayhem, thousands of white Atlantans ran wild through downtown streets. Their anger had been stoked by hysterical and mostly erroneous newspaper accounts of white women raped by black men. Ten blacks were killed; hundreds, black and white, were injured; windows were smashed and trolleys wrecked. The city’s carefully cultivated reputation as the pinnacle of a New South lay in ruins.
In the wake of the Atlanta riots, the vitriolic rhetoric of certain press and politicians would be held chiefly responsible, but that wasn’t the only thing causing the increasing racial antagonism in rapidly industrializing Atlanta. The economic gap between the races was growing ever larger. Race was being used to pit white against black in mills, factories, and on construction sites. More than one hundred thousand blacks had left the state in the past several years and the Georgia Industrial Association was actively seeking European settlers.
White working-class resentment, stoked by the anti-union tactics of white business owners and government officials, was skyrocketing. The recent segregation of the streetcars and other public facilities in Atlanta and the threatened segregation of housing were sources of ongoing agitation by black leaders. Atlanta newspapers regularly ran accounts of black crime, prominently positioned and luridly headlined. Also, in Atlanta and elsewhere, police abuse of blacks was out of hand.
The white police force routinely swept blacks off the street for no particular reason, hauling them into court, often trying them in groups with no lawyers. While many were virtually sold to the private coal mines, rock quarries, and brickyards, others were sent to the dreaded Atlanta Tower, an overcrowded and notorious city prison, or put in chain gangs for short periods. Almost all received small fines, resulting in a handsome purse for the city. Fifteen thousand such arrests were made in 1905.
It was in this edgy atmosphere that a controversial play, The Clansman, opened at the Atlanta Opera House in February. The play had already been banned in some cities, and Atlanta’s black leadership was vehemently protesting the Atlanta performance. Its producers could not have picked a worse time.
Written by preacher-turned-playwright Thomas Dixon, a man Hamiltonians knew well, since he’d married a Columbus woman, the play featured black rapists of white women and extolled the KKK. Dixon was a popular speaker on the Chautauqua circuit, where he called for race war and gloated that the North was joining the South in matters of race. Three years earlier, Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots had been the reigning hit on Broadway. In a letter to a friend about the book version of the play, Dixon had written: “It is the best apology for lynching, it is the finest protest against the mistakes of Reconstruction.�
� The Leopard’s Spots sold well over a million copies, as would The Clansman within a few months of publication.
On that February night in Atlanta, the audience watched blacks depicted as savages lusting after white maidens, corrupting the political process and dominating the white citizenry who desperately tried to rescue civilization. In the final moments, as robed Klansmen galloped onstage astride white horses to save southern womanhood before a blazing cross, the crowd went wild.
When playwright Dixon stood in the footlights at the play’s end and memorialized his father as a member of the Klan, he received a standing ovation. Judge Cooper Williams, who went to Atlanta each month to pick up the vets’ pension checks, was in the audience; with him was his protégé Arthur Hardy, Harris County Journal editor and a man enamored of Dixon, who was already plotting his own novel on the subject of race.
By September, Atlanta’s racial temperatures were soaring. Six white women had been accosted or raped or had claimed to have been raped by black men. Two suspects had been lynched. Newspaper banners became battle cries and circulation soared. “Mob of 2,000 gathered at Lawrence home anxious to burn Negro . . . Let the women arm themselves . . . A reign of terror for southern women . . .” Atlanta Journal editor Charles Daniels called for a new Klan to monitor black behavior and lynch assailants. Amid the frenzy, his power and popularity grew and he was sworn in as deputy sheriff as the county police force was tripled. Over a four-day period, a mob of white Atlantans, estimated in the thousands, ran wild.
White newspapers reported black women attacking white men with parasols. State troops under the command of the judge’s son-in-law, Ed Pomeroy, were called out. Newspapers compared proud, reborn Atlanta to St. Petersburg in the throes of revolution.
