Читать книгу Passionate for Justice - Catherine Meeks - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe life of Ida Wells has become much better known over the past thirty years, when we first encountered her witness.1 While we assume that readers will know a bit of her story, a review of the highlights is in order.
Ida Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. Her father was held as a slave but also was a skilled carpenter, and her mother insisted on education for their children. When freedom came in 1865, her father, Jim Wells, was instrumental in establishing a school for African American kids in Holly Springs, and Ida would attend there. The school still is functioning today as Rust College. After the Civil War, Ida Wells grew up with a sense of possibility as Reconstruction sought to establish equity and parity for people formerly held as slaves. This happened despite all the efforts to reinstate slavery during this time.
Two major events changed the trajectory of Ida’s life. In the 1876 presidential election, no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, so it was given to a fifteen-member commission to decide who the next president would be. Though some scholars dispute the idea, it is generally agreed that even though Republican Rutherford Hayes had lost the popular vote, he won commission votes by promising to withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South. He was named president, and the withdrawal happened shortly thereafter in 1877, ending Reconstruction and leaving the white South able to fully restore its domination, now in the name of “neo-slavery.”2 This was a huge change in the South, and although it would be the 1890s before the white South was able to codify neo-slavery, Ida Wells and many others would live under its monstrous power.
The second major event for Ida Wells happened one year later in 1878. Yellow fever swept through the Mississippi River valley, and Ida was sent to stay with her grandmother in the country. While there, they received the terrible news that both Ida’s father and mother had died in the epidemic. Ida headed back to Holly Springs and found that her father’s Masonic brothers were dividing up her siblings so that they would have a home. Showing her characteristic determination and firepower, Ida refused to allow this to happen. She emphasized strongly that she would oversee her siblings and provide for their care. The adults reluctantly agreed, and for the rest of their childhoods, her siblings would be under her care in one form or fashion—quite an undertaking for a sixteen-year-old! She then lied about her age and got a teaching job in order to support her family.
For several years she worked and raised her siblings, meanwhile moving to Memphis, where she began to engage African Americans in the city. She rode the train to her teaching job on the outskirts of Memphis. It was on one of these trips that the incident happened where she was ordered to move to the “black” car and then thrown off the train when she refused to do so. Here we see a lesson that Ida Wells learned about the devastating power of racism. It was not just the opinions of those individuals classified as “white” that were the problem. She had encountered a dominating white man in the train conductor, but she had also encountered a sympathetic white man in the former Union soldier who was the judge in the court, who ruled in her favor. In the decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court, Ida saw clearly that the law, i.e., the system of the order of society, was filled with racism and was now expressly designed to favor those classified as “white,” despite the deaths of almost 700,000 people in the Civil War to seek to make it otherwise. In her diary entry (highlighted above in the introduction), we saw her despair both for herself and for her kin, those people classified as “black” in American culture. Her answer on that day was the image of flying away, a powerful African image of escaping the oppression of racism by taking flight.
One of Ida Wells’s great gifts, however, was resistance and resilience. Though despairing and discouraged, those emotions did not paralyze her. During her days as a school teacher in the 1880s, she also began to write articles, first for her church weekly, then for local black newspapers. She found her calling! She was passionate and skilled, and she was a dedicated reporter. By 1886, her reports on black life were appearing around the country in black newspapers. In 1889, she bought a one-third interest in Free Speech and Headlight, a small black-owned paper in Memphis. As one of the few women reporters, she found more than her share of sexism, but she persevered, and she began to be recognized for her skills as a reporter rather than the novelty of her gender.3
Then came the next major event to influence her life: three of her acquaintances were lynched in Memphis in March 1892. One of them, Tom Moss, had named her as godmother to his daughter. Their crime? The three African Americans were running a successful grocery store in competition with a white-owned store across the street in a black neighborhood. The owner of the white store gathered a mob to attack their rival store, and the African Americans returned fire when they were attacked. Three white men were wounded, but none were killed. Thirty-one African Americans were arrested, but later they were all removed from the jail by masked raiders. Three of them, including Ida Wells’s good friend Tom Moss, were executed in a lynching.4
If she had not done so already, Wells began to connect the dots behind the motivations for this lynching and many others. She discerned that the lynchings of black people were not responses to individual crimes but rather part of a system-wide effort to reestablish white supremacy throughout the South. The charge of rape against black men as a justification for these murders now rang hollow for Wells. In response, she began a study of the 728 lynchings over the previous ten years. She used white newspapers as her primary sources, and her findings were astonishing to all: only one-third of those lynched were even charged with rape. Some were not charged at all, and other charges included assault, insolence, and theft.
She protested strongly against these lynchings and the white justifications for them. She began to write about them and their sinister purpose in her paper, Free Speech. In early May 1892, she published a blistering editorial about the real purpose for lynching black people, also implying that some of the liaisons between black men and white women were consensual, not rape. She was on a trip to New York, and when she arrived there, she was met by her friend and colleague T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age. He greeted her: “Well, we’ve been a long time getting you to New York, but now that you are here I am afraid that you’ll have to stay.” When she indicated that his comment made no sense, he showed her a copy of a New York paper, which narrated events in Memphis after her Free Speech editorial. Her offices had been burned to the ground, and she was threatened with being lynched herself if she returned to Memphis.5 She would not return to the South again until some thirty years later, in 1922.
In many ways, this was a major turning point for Ida Wells. She now determined to work against lynching and racism and for women’s rights on a national and international level. She became one of the leading advocates against lynching, and she made two trips to Great Britain to develop support there for the antilynching campaign. She developed a rapport with Ferdinand Douglass in his later years. He indicated to her that even he, the giant of the antislavery movement, had begun to believe—just a little bit—that black men’s sexuality was part of the issue in all the lynchings.6 He was grateful to Ida Wells for reminding him that lynchings were about white supremacy, not black sexuality. He wrote an introduction to her Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, published in 1892.
Wells was a powerful and fierce speaker on the subjects of racial justice, the need to engage and defeat white supremacy, and rights for women. In 1895, in the midst of her touring and writing, she married attorney Frederick Douglass and moved to Chicago. Her wedding announcement was on the front page of the New York Times Style section. She delayed the event three times because she was so busy speaking against lynching.7 Once she got married, she sought to balance domestic life (including having four children) and her activist life. Others watched her balancing act, and some, like her friend Susan B. Anthony, criticized her for choosing family life over political life. Catherine will explore this relationship more fully in chapter 5.
Wells struggled with what Anthony called “divided duty” and sought to make it work on both sides. She chafed that this “divided duty” issue came up for women but not for men. She took her first son, Charles, with her to many meetings in his infancy, but when she had her second child, Herman, in 1897, she decided to retire from public life to tend to her family. The retirement lasted five months, when she responded to a call to advocate on behalf of justice for a postmaster lynched in South Carolina.8 With the birth of two other children, daughters Ida and Alfreda, she slowed down in public life considerably, but she remained a tireless worker against lynchings and for racial justice.
One of the ways that she sought to address women’s issues was the formation of women’s clubs and national associations of women around political issues. She helped to organize the first National Conference of Colored Women in Boston in 1895, and she attended their first convention in Washington, DC, in 1896, when they changed their name to the National Association of Colored Women. This meeting was a combining of many streams: women from the antislavery days, such as Frances E. W. Harper and the powerful Harriet Tubman, joining now with those struggling against the reinstatement of neo-slavery under Jim Crow. Wells established women’s clubs in Chicago and Illinois and helped to organize the women to work for equity on the local, state, and national levels.
Things were changing on the national scene, as the white supremacists in the South linked with antiblack allies in the north to reestablish “slavery by another name,” as Doug Blackmon so aptly called it. The death of Ferdinand Douglass in 1895 left a huge vacuum in national voices for racial equality, and Booker T. Washington stepped in to fill the gap. Washington, however, seemed to prefer agitation for self-improvement for African Americans over agitation for equal rights. Washington gave a speech at the opening of Piedmont Park in Atlanta in September 1895 in which he seemed to surrender the work for racial equality to the rising tide of racism. He was astute politically and became the most powerful black man in America, but Wells and others like W. E. B. Du Bois strenuously opposed this direction. Wells put it like this in her autobiography:
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 be abolished.9
Washington’s philosophy was complicated, but in the end, it affirmed the white supremacist point of view, that people of African descent were not equal to people of Anglo descent. Those classified as “black” did not have equal rights because they were not deserving of them.
This was the mantra during slavery, and while it wobbled a bit during Reconstruction, by the 1890s it had returned in full force, not just in the South but throughout the nation. Washington read the political winds better than did Ida Wells, but his subsequent surrender of the struggles for racial equality gave white supremacy political and even scientific cover for its views. In 1896 the Supreme Court decided 8–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land. In practice it actually meant “separate and unequal.” In 1898, whites in Wilmington, North Carolina, staged a coup d’etat, overthrowing the legitimately elected black city government, killing many black citizens in the process. Ida Wells appealed to President William McKinley to intercede, but he refused to do so. Wells then publicly criticized President McKinley for his allowing white supremacy to prevail. Her growing radicalism brought her into conflict with many organizations that had welcomed her earlier, both on political and sexist grounds.
With four children now, Wells leaned back toward the domestic side of the “divided duty,” never dropping out, but spending less time on the road and more time closer to home. In 1909 she went to New York to participate in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she made an impassioned plea to adopt a strong antilynching platform. While she had hoped to be named as one of the forty founding committee members, her radicality kept her off the list, and she admitted in her autobiography that her hurt feelings clouded her judgment. She refused to allow her name to be amended to the list, and she left the meeting.10
In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected to be president of the United States, the first Southerner to hold the office since the Civil War. Women’s groups were agitating for the right to vote for women, and they organized a march on the day before Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Wells went to DC to participate in it, but the National American Woman Suffrage Association told her that she could not join the march because they did not want to antagonize the white Southern women. Wells dropped back a few rows and joined in the march anyway, stepping in to march with the Illinois delegation. She would return to Washington later in 1913 as part of the delegation from the National Equal Rights League, founded by William Monroe Trotter of Boston. They met with President Wilson to urge him to disavow the idea of resegregation of the federal government. Wilson heard them and promised to assist them, but he did not. Indeed, segregation in the offices of the federal government was reestablished early in Wilson’s presidency.
All during this time of her “divided duty,” Wells formed clubs to assist those African Americans fleeing persecution in the South in the great migration. The main club was called the Negro Fellow ship League, and it offered housing, meals, counseling, and fellowship for those migrating north. Wells not only talked about these kinds of things, but she herself put them into action. When the funding ran out for the center, she obtained a job as a probation officer and used her salary to fund the League’s activities.
Because of its importance in her formation and its terroristic nature, she remained keenly interested in the continuing issue of lynching. Where the number of lynchings had diminished, they revived again during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. She traveled to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917 to investigate the murders there of over forty African Americans. In 1919 another white race riot that started near Elaine, Arkansas, and spread throughout Phillips County would become the deadliest lynching in American history, when at least 237 African-Americans were murdered.11 Its location is close to where Catherine and Nibs both grew up in Arkansas.
Twelve African American men were arrested for murder, though white marauders had clearly started the violence.12 For the protection of the twelve, they were moved from the jail in Helena, Arkansas, to Little Rock. They had been convicted and sentenced to death, and they were given stays of execution several times, as their nationally known case, Moore v. Dempsey, made it to the US Supreme Court. Early in the case, Ida Wells began to raise funds for their defense, and one of the twelve wrote her and asked her to help them and to visit them. In January 1922, she decided to go to Arkansas to visit the men. It would be her first trip South since she arrived in New York in May 1892, shortly after her offices in Memphis had been firebombed, and a price put on her head.
In that light, she was somewhat anxious, and as she got closer to Helena, she went incognito as a cousin of one of the men in jail. She and a group of the men’s relatives went to visit the men in jail, and the men’s eyes lit up when they were told that the visitor was not a cousin but was Ida B. Wells. They talked for a long while, and Wells took many notes on their stories. Then the men sang some songs of their own and some spirituals. At the end of the singing, Ida Wells gave them a charge:
I have been listening to you for nearly two hours. You have talked and sung and prayed about dying, and forgiving your enemies, and of feeling sure that you are going to be received in the New Jerusalem because your God knows that you are innocent of the offense for which you expect to be electrocuted. But why don’t you pray to live and ask to be freed? The God you serve is the God of Paul and Silas who opened their prison gates, and if you have all the faith you say you have, you ought to believe that he will open your prison doors too. . . . Quit talking about dying; if you believe your God is all powerful, believe that he is powerful enough to open these prison doors, and say so.13
As in so many cases, Ida Wells proved to be prophetic. Moore vs. Dempsey was the first case in the twentieth century to be considered by the Supreme Court in regard to the rights of African Americans in the South in criminal matters. The Court heard the case in January 1923, and in February ruled 6–2 that the twelve had been denied their constitutional rights. The case was remanded back to the lower courts, and eventually all twelve were freed. Wells noted that their Arkansas attorney Scipio Jones gave her credit for increasing publicity about the case and helping to raise so much money. Later one of the twelve who were freed showed up at her home in Chicago to thank her for her efforts.14 It was one of the few cases where Ida Wells was part of the winning side on the issue of racial justice, yet she remained a strong voice and activist for racial justice in the midst of the tidal wave of racism. White supremacy swept over the South and indeed the entire country.
Ida Wells was a mighty voice for justice for African Americans, for women, and for those who were poor. Her life is a testimony and a witness for all of us as we consider our place in this current atmosphere of danger and fear. Her times, even more than our own, saw the forces of violence and oppression and white supremacy regather strength, just as they are doing in our day. The final chapter of her autobiography is entitled “The Price of Liberty.” She never finished the chapter because she was struck with a sudden illness and died in just a few days in March 1931. This is the paragraph that began that final chapter:
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights. This leads me to wonder if we are not too well satisfied to be able to point to our wonderful institutions with complacence and draw the salaries connected therewith, instead of being alert as the watchman on the wall.15
Questions for Further Reflection
1. Which parts of this chapter make you want to learn more about Ida Wells?
2. What puzzles you about the narrative of the life of Ida Wells?
3. How have things changed in terms of racial justice since Ida Wells was alive? What has not changed?
1. To learn more about Wells, see Alfreda Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
2. For more on this, see Goldstone, Dark Bargain, 104–8.
3. Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers (New York: Feminist Press, 1988), 73–75.
4. Ibid., 78–79.
5. Duster, Crusade, 61.
6. Ibid., 72.
7. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “When Ida B. Wells Married, It Was a Page One Story,” New York Times, January 23, 2017, p. 10.
8. Sterling, Black Foremothers, 99.
9. Duster, Crusade, 265.
10. Duster, Crusade, 325–26. “Ida did leave the meeting that founded the NAACP. Then she confronted DuBois about taking her name off the list. He eventually put it back on. Sixty people signed the call.”
11. Campbell Robertson, “History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names,” New York Times, February 10, 2015, https://nyti.ms/1z3dYQx.
12. For a full account of this case, see Richard Cortner, A Mob Intent on Death (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), and Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004).
13. Duster, Crusade, 402–3.
14. Ibid., 403–4.
15. Ibid., 415.
