At the age of fifty-five, she was probably tired of the chronic injustice. She had already seen too much. The lack of respect for the lives of Black people was embedded in the country’s history, yet she strongly believed that these soldiers needed to be honored for their service.
When the two Secret Service agents told Ida she could be brought up on treason charges, she had a simple reply: “I understand treason to mean giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. How can the distribution of this little button do that?”
The agents were unmoved. They told her that she should be grateful not to be in a country like Germany, where she would have been shot for that kind of insubordination. They demanded her assurance that she would stop distributing the buttons altogether.
Ida scoffed. She wasn’t going to give up that easily. She had never been one to back down from others’ intimidation. She knew the men’s threats were empty and told them they ought to be very sure of their facts if they wanted to carry out their duties.
Ida B. Wells (circa 1917). She wore and distributed buttons to peacefully bring awareness to the murder of Black soldiers, but even this was viewed as a threat by the Wilson administration.
The shorter man admitted to Ida that they couldn’t arrest her, but they could confiscate her buttons. When he asked where they were, noting that he’d heard she was showing them to a man as the agents arrived, Ida was nonplussed. She said the reporter must have taken the buttons with him.
The agents weren’t satisfied with that answer. They asked her once more to turn over the buttons, reminding her that she had criticized the government.
Ida’s response was characteristically strident: “Yes, and the government deserves to be criticized. I think it was a dastardly thing to hang those men as if they were criminals and put them in holes in the ground just as if they had been dead dogs,” she said. “If it is treason for me to think and say so, then you will have to make the most of it.”
When the shorter man told her that most of her people did not agree with her, she proudly announced, “I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking back what I have said. I would consider it an honor to spend whatever years are necessary in prison as the one member of the race who protested, rather than be with all the 11,999,999 Negroes who didn’t have to go to prison because they kept their mouths shut.”
When the agents told her she ought to consult a lawyer, Ida was amused. Her husband was a lawyer, after all. The two had discussed this possibility as they planned together to distribute the buttons. She knew her rights. The Secret Service agents stared at her in amazement. They left without the buttons, and she was never bothered about them again.
The next day, stories were printed about the incident, spreading word far and wide about what Ida’s buttons were about and where to get them. The FBI later successfully went after Ida’s button printer, warning him to not make any more. Ida wore one of the buttons for many years following this incident because of the significance it held for her. Ida might have suspected then that an FBI file would be created about her in the wake of this incident, but she obviously did not care. If she did, she was right. A file was opened in early 1918.
FBI file 123754
January 2, 1918
Frank G. Clark
Chicago, Illinois
In re Mrs Ida Wells Barnett
Negro Good Fellowship League
3005 S. State Street
At Chicago
Agent called on subject together with Detective Sergeant Bush, Chief Schuttler’s office, Chicago Police Department and told her that Department of Justice wanted her to discontinue sale of buttons. She went into a great deal of detail concerning her right to protest against the recent hanging of the negro soldiers, saying it was the first time this had ever been done without an appeal to the president. She would not give me a definite answer whether she would stop the sale of these buttons or not and she also said she wanted to be brought into court so that she could die for this cause if need be. She added she would see her lawyer and obtain his advice before she would say yes or not to our order to stop this sale.
Called on Sec. Lauterer Co., 322 W. Madison St. and they say they made up 500 buttons and delivered them December 15th. I warned them not to make any further deliveries of the same, and they promised not to take any more orders. I could not locate Mrs. Barnett today, her maid saying she went to the office and the office knew nothing of her whereabouts.
Reported above facts to Mr. Olabaugh.
In Good Company
Ida was hardly the only crusader against injustice who attracted the harsh scrutiny of the FBI. Over the years, the agency has compiled lengthy files on some of the most well-known Black activists, along with other dissenters, including pacifists and labor organizers. Between the 1920s and the 1980s, the FBI and the Justice Department operated in tandem to continuously surveil communities and individuals who were deemed “suspect.” Often, that meant people like Ida—those who witnessed discrimination and violence against their people and refused to stay silent about it. Though there were many others, a small handful of those people include:
W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868–1963)
A contemporary of Ida’s, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an author, historian, and civil rights activist. The first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University, he became a professor at Atlanta University. He later led the Niagara Movement, a group that sought equal rights for African Americans. Du Bois was also concerned with the treatment of Black people around the world, and he became a leader of Pan-Africanist thought. Like Ida, he protested lynching, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. Along with hers, his writing remains some of the most influential scholarship on racism, sociology, and Black experiences in the United States.
TUSKEGEE AIRMEN
The travesty with the 1917 World War I soldiers was not the last time the government treated Black soldiers differently than white soldiers. In fact, almost thirty years later, during World War II, the soldiers who became known as the Tuskegee Airmen were held to a different standard than their white counterparts. Prior to 1940, Black people were not allowed to fly for the U.S. military. That changed after various civil rights organizations advocated for equal rights—and the Tuskegee Airmen were formed in 1941. The group of Army Air Corps men were trained to fly and maintain combat aircraft by the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. They became pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and more. Still, they endured segregation and extreme prejudice even as they served the country they’d trained extensively to fight for. More about their efforts can be learned at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama, which President Bill Clinton approved the creation of over fifty years later, in 1998.
W. E. B. Du Bois.
A. PHILIP RANDOLPH (1889–1979)
Asa Philip Randolph was a prominent political leader who organized across the country. In 1925, he led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly African American labor union in the country. In the decades after, he protested unfair labor practices, ultimately leading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pass an executive order banning discrimination in the military and defense industries during World War II. Randolph was also the head of the March on Washington in 1963, the civil rights movement–era action where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
ELLA BAKER (1903–1986)
Ella Baker played a key role in many of the most impactful civil rights organizations of the 1900s, including the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (which the FBI also tracked). She raised money to fight Jim Crow laws in the South, ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship, and helped organize sit-ins with the student activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. (1908–1972)
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a
Baptist minister who represented the people of Harlem, a New York City neighborhood, in the House of Representatives from 1945 until the year before his death, more than twenty-five years later. Before his congressional tenure, though, Powell fought various social ills using community-organizing strategies: for example, he organized a picket line at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Two years later, he led a bus boycott in Harlem, where, like many cities, Black people were routinely denied jobs despite being most of the passengers.
MALCOLM X (1925–1965)
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (also known as Malcolm X), the American Muslim minister and human rights activist, was the subject of a ten-thousand-page FBI file because of the Nation of Islam’s supposed links to communism, as well as his strident efforts to empower Black people. He was under near-constant surveillance until his assassination in 1965.
Two Very Different Fights
By the time Ida was visited by the FBI, she had already been fighting her personal battle for respect and equality for more than thirty years. It may be hard to imagine over a century later, but by the time 1913 rolled around and Ida was entrenched in the suffrage movement, women had been fighting for the right to vote for over sixty years. Even before the Civil War started in 1861, some middle- and upper-class women, mostly concentrated in the North, had started work to expand the vote to all people. Suffrage organizations came to prominence in the late 1840s, and as time went on, divisions began to emerge among white women, specifically about the prospect of including Black women in their mission.
Ida agreed that gaining the right to vote was important and deserved a fight, but she did not feel optimistic about how much change would come from white women voting. She disagreed with Susan B. Anthony and other white suffragists’ belief that securing the vote for women would also bring a “womanly” influence to government, making it less corrupt and more compassionate. Ida had been around too long and endured too much complicity from white women involved in holding up white supremacy to believe that white women’s votes would fix the ills of the world. As an African American woman who had faced both racism and sexism, she viewed the right to vote as a tool to address race-based oppression, as well as civil and social issues. She knew that southern white women could be expected to support their husbands’ cries of white supremacy. After all, some of them were descendants of slave owners or had benefited from the institution of slavery, so they inherently viewed Black women as inferior. Thus, suffrage extended only to white women would do little to bring on much-needed racial reform.
But as women slowly gained more rights, one state at a time, Ida started to think that Susan B. Anthony was right after all: things might improve when all women won the vote. Despite the quest for the women’s vote, Black women were significantly excluded from white-dominated national suffrage organizations. Locally, Ida founded the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club and was a member of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA). She worked with white women in the efforts to gain suffrage in the state. “When I saw that we were likely to have limited suffrage and the white women were working like beavers to bring it about, I made another effort to get our women interested,” she wrote in her autobiography. Ida wanted to make sure that if white women got the right to vote, Black women did, too.
Two white women worked with Ida to found the first all-Black suffrage club in Illinois: Virginia Brooks, a young member of the IESA, and Belle Squire, president of the No Vote, No Tax League, an organization advocating that women who could not vote should not have to pay taxes. In January 1913, the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC) was born.
One of the first activities of the Alpha Suffrage Club was to send Ida as president of the club to Washington, DC, to represent them in the suffrage march. It was planned to take place on March 3, 1913, just before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as the twenty-eighth president. Ida was one of more than five thousand women from around the country who gathered in Washington, DC, to march and demand the vote. She arrived in Washington with the sixty-two-member integrated contingent of the Illinois suffragists, who promptly began going over the logistics of their walking four abreast down Pennsylvania Avenue. While they were practicing, the group was informed that the organizers wanted the Black women to march in the back of the parade in order to appease the southern suffragists.
Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks volunteered to walk by Ida’s side in the segregated section of the parade. After announcing that she would not march at all if she was expected to be in the back, she pretended to consent to the offer. The meeting adjourned with a plan on how things would proceed.
The next day, as everyone was lining up for the parade, Ida could not be found. The parade commenced, and no one knew that Ida walked along the sidelines. When the Illinois delegation started to march, suddenly Ida B. emerged from the crowd to march front and center in the group of all-white marchers.
The March 5 issue of the Chicago Tribune ran a large photo of them, standing together, with broad suffrage sashes across their dresses. Each had a satisfied expression on her face. Ida integrated the parade without the consent of its leaders. No one was going to put her in the back—ever.
Soon after the event, the poet and suffragist Bettiola H. Fortson composed a poem titled “Queen of Our Race,” celebrating Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s participation in the historic march.
Ida B. Wells marching with the Illinois delegation, March 3, 1913.
Side by side with the whites she walked,
Step after step the southerners balked,
But Illinois, fond of order and grace,
Stuck to the black Queen of our race.
’Tis true, they’re able at this age to bar,
But justice will soon send the doors ajar
And sit the black and white face to face
There will be seen the Queen of our race.
Page after page in history you’ll read
Of one who was ready and able to lead,
Who set the nation on fire with her pace
And the Heroine will be the Queen of our race.
Unlike the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club, the ASC was nonpartisan and focused on mobilizing Black women throughout the city of Chicago. The club met at the Negro Fellowship League every Wednesday night. Even though she was a busy mother of four, the fifty-one-year-old Ida B. simply could not sit still. She began a newsletter for the organization called the Alpha Suffrage Record, which she edited in addition to the Fellowship Herald newspaper as she continued to write articles about lynching and segregation. She also ran the Negro Fellowship League, held a full-time job as a probation officer, and attended a dizzying number of meetings. There was always a battle to fight and an injustice to address.
REPUBLICANS VS. DEMOCRATS
Among African Americans, for almost one hundred years after the Civil War, the Republican Party was considered the more “progressive” party, as it was the party of Abraham Lincoln, who was credited with ending slavery. The Democratic Party was more associated with the oppression of Black people. After the “Southern Strategy” to win over conservative Republicans was implemented in the 1960s, the focus of the political parties became almost the opposite of what they had been. That led to the more familiar views of the political parties that we see today.
In June 1913, the state of Illinois passed a new law that granted women limited suffrage in the state. Under this law, which was the result of lobbying by national and local suffrage organizations and clubs, women were allowed to vote for presidential candidates and local officers. They were not, however, allowed to vote for governor, members of Congress, or state representatives. Soon after the bill was passed in Illinois, suffragists and their daughters marched in a big downtown Chicago parade. Wearing a white dress with a white banner across it that read ALPHA SUFFRAGE, Ida’s nine-year-old daughter Alfreda marched down Michigan Avenue alongside her.
See You in Court
The suffrage march in Washington, DC, wasn’t the first time someone had trie
d to relegate Ida to a lesser placement. Ida had fought a historic battle in the state of Tennessee almost thirty years earlier. In 1881, the state of Tennessee passed a Jim Crow law specifying that Black and white train passengers ride in separate cars. Ida defied this law and continued to ride to and from the school where she taught in what was called the “ladies’ coach.”
Segregation was enforced sporadically at the time, and Ida rode largely undisturbed for more than two years. That changed on September 15, 1883. Ida rode aboard a train going from Memphis to Woodstock when she was asked to move to the colored car instead of the ladies’ car. Ida felt that was a ridiculous request, as she had purchased a first-class ticket and was riding the train just as she had been doing for years. She decided not to comply.
The conductor tried to drag the twenty-one-year-old Ida from her seat. She wasn’t going to let that happen so easily: as he grabbed her, Ida bit his hand. The angry conductor let go, but he wasn’t finished with her. He went to get two more men to help him remove the petite Ida, who stood no more than five feet tall. As she waged a fierce fight, the other passengers looked on as if the situation were entertainment and actually cheered once she gave up and allowed herself to be removed.
Rather than go into the colored car, Ida exited the train. Her clothes had been torn, and she had been bruised in several places. She knew her father would be proud of how she refused to accept humiliation without a fight. She held back tears as she stood on the side of the railroad tracks, thinking about how no white woman would ever be treated in such a disrespectful and violent way. She was an educated, professional woman who had paid her fare, yet she had been accosted simply because she was a Black woman.
Ida B. the Queen Page 3
