To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells - Hardcover

Bay, Mia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809095297 ISBN 13: 9780809095292

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2009

Synopsis

Born to slaves in 1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless antilynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, and journalist. Wells’s refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a “dangerous radical” in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. In the richly illustrated To Tell the Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells’s legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Progressive-era Chicago. Wells’s fight for racial and gender justice began in 1883, when she was a young schoolteacher who traveled to her rural schoolhouse by rail. Forcibly ejected from her seat on a train one day on account of her race, Wells immediately sued the railroad. Though she ultimately lost her case on appeal in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, the published account of her legal challenge to Jim Crow changed her life, propelling her into a career as an outspoken journalist and social activist. Also a fierce critic of the racial violence that marked her era, Wells went on to launch a crusade against lynching that took her across the United States and eventually to Britain. Though she helped found the NAACP in 1910 after resettling in Chicago, she would not remain a member for long. Always militant in her quest for racial justice, Wells rejected not only Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP. The life of Ida B. Wells and her enduring achievements are dramatically recovered in Mia Bay’s To Tell the Truth Freely.

About this title

About the Author:

Mia Bay is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University and the associate director of Rutgers’s Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is also the author of The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

 

"If Iola Were a Man"

 

As the Nineteenth Century came to a close, a young African American woman named Ida B. Wells was acclaimed "the most widely known woman of her race in the world."1 Born a slave in Civil War-ravaged Mississippi,Wells achieved freedom with emancipation, and international renown in the 1890s, when she rose to fame as a journalist, speaker, and civil rights activist who led an international crusade against lynching. She was just thirty years old when she first began her campaign to end the brutal white-on-black mob violence that took the lives of at least 3,220 African American men, women, and children between 1882 and 1930—a period that marks the high tide of this violence. Wells would remain an antilynching crusader all her life, with good reason. During much of it, lynching was so popular in the South that it was commemorated in postcards featuring the dead black bodies hanging from trees, bridges, and streetlights. And even outside of the South, the mob violence went almost wholly unchallenged until Wells began her antilynching crusade. The lynch mobs' victims, usually both black and male, were sometimes accused of rape, and invariably condemned as criminals after the fact—although they were put to death without judge or jury. As the postcards advertising these lynchings testify, the practice was not covert. Instead, it was the work of white mobs who displayed dead African American bodies to underscore their continuing racial dominion over a people only recently freed from slavery.

 

A member of that new generation of ex-slaves, Ida B.Wells came of age at a time when her people needed aggressive leaders who could combat the erosion of black civil and political rights that accompanied the end of the Reconstruction era. By the late nineteenth century, the voting rights, political power, and social freedoms that African Americans had won when the South was first reconstructed after the Civil War were under assault. Anxious to restore the white supremacy that slavery had once guaranteed, white Southerners used mob violence, political terrorism, and election fraud to drive the freed people and their Republican allies out of politics. What came next was a Jim Crow South, where few African Americans voted, and all were subject to segregation and many other forms of legal and economic discrimination. While white Southerners called the end of Reconstruction a blessed "Redemption," among African Americans it represented a devastating setback in the struggle for freedom that dated back to slavery. Moreover, it came at a time when many of the black leaders who had led that struggle were too old to head the new battle now needed to protect emancipation's freedoms. A new generation of black leaders was needed, and Wells would become one of them.

 

Born to slave parents in 1862, she had defied remarkable odds before she ever embarked on her antilynching campaign. Orphaned at age sixteen when her parents died in the yellow fever epidemic that swept the Mississippi Valley in 1878, she raised her five younger siblings by herself, taking a teaching job in a rural school that same year. Her own education remained incomplete as a result, but Wells pursued a tireless course of self-education, reading and writing her way into a career in journalism under the pen name "Iola." By her late twenties, Wells had become one of the preeminent female journalists of her day, and the editor and co-owner of the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper Free Speech and Headlight. Now widely acclaimed as "Iola, the Princess of the Press,"Wells saw her career almost derailed in the spring of 1892, when a white mob lynched three black businessmen in Memphis. Shocked by the violence and mourning the death of three men she had known for years, one as a close friend,Wells protested the murders.

 

She also began an investigation of lynching that would last a lifetime and see her exiled from the South. The three men who died in Memphis had committed no crime other than to open a store that challenged a nearby white-owned business. Accordingly, their deaths inspired Wells to research the causes of lynching. White Southerners justified lynching as a necessary "check on the horrible and beastly propensities of the black race." Black men were prone to the crime of rape, they insisted. Only "the most prompt, speedy and extreme punishment" could prevent them from preying on "weak and defenseless [white] women."2 But as Wells soon discovered, more than two-thirds of the African American men murdered by lynch mobs were never even accused of rape. Indeed, like her dead friend, many of the victims of white mob violence were never accused of any serious crime. Outraged by her findings, Wells wrote an editorial indicting Southern whites for lynching black men "on the old threadbare lie that black men rape white women," which soon brought death threats that forced Wells to leave the South.3 She left just ahead of the white mob that attacked the offices of Free Speech, smashing her presses and shutting down her paper. But the attacks made her all the more determined to expose lynching's true cause by telling "the truth freely."4

 

After she left Memphis Wells launched an antilynching campaign that took her from Tennessee to New York, Great Britain, and Chicago, and garnered her new acclaim as one of the most forceful African American leaders of the day. Her antilynching campaign, as one contemporary commentator noted, addressed the most urgent issue facing black America at a time when "none of our representative and most prominent black men would take up the lead." Another deemed her "the only successor to Frederick Douglass"—the former fugitive slave who became black America's great antislavery leader. As such observers were well aware, the two black leaders had much in common. "Both were editors, both were orators, and both began their careers passionately committed to righting the worst forms of injustice that, in their respective times, were inflicted on their people," writes Douglass biographer William McFeely.5 Moreover, after the two met in 1892, they became fast friends; Douglass wrote a number of letters of support for Wells, including testimonials for the antilynching pamphlets Wells published before Douglass's death in 1895—providing a public record of his support for her.6 In his seventies by the time they met, Douglass served as both a mentor and a role model to Wells, whose antilynching campaign mobilized some of the same international reform networks Douglass had once rallied to the antislavery cause.

 

The British, in particular, had lent powerful moral authority and financial support to the abolitionist movement. They proved a crucial audience for Wells, who, at the beginning of her campaign, had trouble even gaining a hearing among whites at home. American whites in both the North and the South chose to regard lynching as a Negro problem largely brought on by the criminal character of the race, but the British proved more receptive to Wells's well-researched analysis of its true causes. Moreover, they were also supportive when Wells asked them to once again champion the unrealized liberties of the freed people—just as they had supported their emancipation. The result was the formation of a much publicized British Anti-Lynching Committee, which shamed a number of American states into drafting, and in some cases even passing, antilynching legislation, and fostered an Anglo-American discussion of lynching that made headlines in both countries.

 

Lynching did not end in the 1890s, or for many years to come. But Wells's campaign transformed lynching from a practice that went largely uncontested even among Northern whites into an ugly symbol of the racial injustices of Jim Crow. Not the first African American to speak out against lynching, Wells was the first to gain a broad audience. Her work is notable for crafting an analysis of lynching that remains pathbreaking even to this day. In challenging the practice, Wells cut through the myths about black rapists that white Southerners used to defend lynching. Lynching had nothing to do with rape and everything to do with power, Wells argued, presenting the facts and figures to prove it. White men policed the color line even to the point of murdering black men who engaged in consensual relationships with white women, and most lynchings did not involve allegations of rape. Instead, lynchings sustained the all-encompassing system of racial domination that marked the New South by terrorizing blacks and "keeping the nigger down."

 

Subsequent civil rights activists would agree, organizing much of the early twentieth-century civil rights struggle around antilynching strategies pioneered by Wells. But Wells would not lead them, nor go on to be Frederick Douglass's successor. Although she appears among the major leaders of the race in an 1895 photo collage that includes Frederick Douglass and Tuskegee Institute principal Booker T. Washington, she would have trouble sustaining prominence as a national leader even through the remainder of the 1890s. Eclipsed at least in part by Washington's meteoric rise to fame on a platform of black accommodation to Jim Crow, she also during those years became a wife and mother, marrying the Chicago-based African American lawyer Ferdinand Barnett. Thereafter, she juggled her public life with domestic responsibilities that included two stepsons and soon came to include four children of her own. But neither motherhood nor the growing power of Booker T. Washington fully explain why Wells's sojourn in the national spotlight was so brief. An activist all her life, Wells would continue to battle lynching and other forms of racial injustice for the remainder of her days. But she ended her life as a leader more prominent in Chicago than the nation as a whole.

 

Undoubtedly, sexism circumscribed her career, as did her assertive personality, which many contemporaries found to be at odds with her gender. Even her admirers could never compliment her leadership without noting that it was ill-suited to her sex. "If Iola were a man," black journalist T. Thomas Fortune said of Wells after first meeting her, calling her by her pen name, "she would be a humming independent in politics. She has plenty of nerve, and is sharp as a steel trap." And over time, such admirers would often turn on Wells for possessing traits admirable only in men. Fortune himself was a case in point. By 1899, Fortune, who had once employed Wells at his newspaper The New York Age, had allied with Booker T. Washington, and began to dismiss his former protégée as "a bull in a China shop."7

 

Whether Wells's career would have indeed taken a different path if she had been a man remains impossible to say, although her contemporaries' persistent unease with her gender suggests as much. An activist by nature, Wells had limitations above and beyond her sex when it came to sustaining a following. She often resisted the "restraints of organization," as a later critic would note. Hardheaded to a fault, and possessed of a temper that she acknowledged to be a "besetting sin,"Wells helped build a stunning variety of black organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), only to find herself comfortable in none of them. More radical than most of her contemporaries, she also had no gift for compromise and often departed in a huff from the organizations that she helped create, her famous temper flaring when negotiations did not go her way. As a result, her contemporaries considered her difficult, although even that assessment cannot be decoupled from her gender. With the possible exception of Booker T. Washington, most of the leading African Americans of her era were difficult, in one way or another.

 

Early twentieth-century black leaders had to contend with a racist white majority that questioned their qualifications for leadership, while defending their community against a relentless assault on black civil rights. Not surprisingly, strong personalities prevailed among their ranks. Such personalities included the NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois, who deposed Booker T. Washington to become the early twentieth century's most preeminent leader. A man who frequently butted heads with Wells, Du Bois was often described as "arrogant."He spent much of his career battling with both black and white contemporaries—without ever being written off as "a bull in a China shop." A strong mind was more of a liability in a woman.

 

Moreover, Wells-Barnett—as she renamed herself after her marriage—had other leadership liabilities as well. Born at the end of the slavery era, she became a leader without the help of the kind of educational or social credentials that would help younger black leaders such as Du Bois earn the respect of the increasingly educated black middle class—and their white allies as well. Although Wells was active in the Progressive-era reform community, her credentials as wife, mother, and self-educated journalist paled next to the academic credentials that supplied many black and white progressives with their leadership qualifications. She was also less educated and socially elite than many of the black club women she helped organize during her antilynching campaign. Founded in 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) first took shape around her work, but she was never considered for any leadership post in that organization.

 

Disappointed but never despairing about the many obstacles her leadership faced, Wells remained committed to the "preservation of our [African American] liberties" all her life. Tireless foes of mob violence in Illinois, she and her husband, Ferdinand, fought a successful battle for effective antilynching legislation there, and then moved on to fight injustices within the state's legal system, offering representation to blacks who had been unfairly imprisoned, and support and guidance to black prisoners as a group. Moreover, even though Wells would not remain active in the NAACP or the NACW or any other national organization, she continued to fight lynching and other forms of racial injustice in Illinois and elsewhere, protesting the race riots of the twentieth century's first decades as well as the federal government's mistreatment of black soldiers during World War I. Also active on behalf of early childhood education, women's suffrage, temperance, and the social welfare of Chicago blacks, Wells was involved in Republican politics, and even made an unsuccessful bid for a state senate seat in Illinois in 1930—at age sixty-eight. Her campaign capped a life committed to a range of causes so extensive that they defy easy summary. Raised by ex-slaves and informed by an education that included reading the Bible cover to cover and imbibing all the most activist elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ida always felt compelled to "do something" in the face of "injustice or discrimination." Her life bears eloquent testimony to the power of that commitment. An African American leader barely a generation removed from slavery, Wells drew on forms of antebellum politics that survived the Civil War but have not always been appreciated by historians since. In particular, the keen political insights that Wells brought out of her ex-slave upbringing lend strong support to the work of scholars such as Steven Hahn, who maintains ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0809095297
• ISBN 13: 9780809095292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384