Negroes and the Gun (20 page)

“The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” So said Ida B. Wells.

What would drive a four-and-a-half-foot tall colored schoolteacher to say such a thing? What did she witness? What did she fear? What were the rumors and threats that shrouded her rise from slavery to the vanguard of the black freedom struggle? And what was the culture that allowed this eminent leader of the race to exalt a gun that was the assault rifle of her day, without censure and, indeed, to wide affirmation?

Wells came of age during the period many consider the nadir of the black experience in America. She witnessed the violent defeat of Reconstruction and chafed under the menace of John Lynch and the indignities of Jim Crow. It was a period filled with hazards where the government was not just neglectful of Negro security but was often an overt menace. Wells's praise of the Winchester reflected hard lessons and worries about the next dark night, passed along on the whispers of black folk.

By age twenty, Wells had been orphaned by a yellow-fever epidemic; had become caretaker of her siblings; and had moved from her childhood home of Holly Springs, Mississippi, to Memphis, where a coveted teaching contract introduced her to the city's black elite. It was the start of her journey into journalism, publishing, and her destiny as America's foremost antilynching crusader.

Memphis in 1881, was a relative haven of opportunity for Negroes, whose performance on criteria like employment and arrest rates would be the envy of modern policy makers. But other aspects of the climate in Memphis were not so salutary. Blacks and Irish immigrants competed for much of the same low-cost housing and unskilled work. Black war veterans were natural combatants with the Memphis police force, which was 90 percent Irish and was described by a white army officer as “far from the best class of residents.”

Political leaders of the period were candidly unsympathetic to Negro interests. Tennessee governor William Brownlow hopefully predicted that, with no masters
to care for them, most Negroes would perish from starvation and disease within a generation. It turned out that these folk were of heartier stock.
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Ida Wells's fighting instinct first erupted on board a Chesapeake and Ohio passenger train. The traveling strategy for colored ladies of the day was meticulous grooming and impeccable manners, with the hope of avoiding the demeaning, random ejections from the first-class car. Wells pursued this strategy in the fall of 1883, but would only play the game so far.

When she handed her first-class ticket to the conductor, he ordered her to move to second class. Wells ignored him and turned to her novel. Provoked by her impudence, the conductor grabbed her luggage and hissed that he was attempting to treat her like a lady. Wells answered that he should leave the lady alone. Now fed up, the conductor grabbed at Wells, intent on dragging her out like cattle.

Wells set her feet wide against the seat-front and clutched hard into the headrest. When the conductor tried to pry her away, she sank her teeth into his hand. She was defeated only after several passengers helped the bleeding conductor lift away the entire seat section where Wells was anchored and throw it and her into the smoky second-class car.

Bruised, her dress torn, and her ego battered, Wells left the train at the next stop, to the jeers of the first-class passengers. The episode triggered the first stage of her activism. She sued the C&O Railroad and followed with a series of lawsuits against other rail lines. Some companies responded with separate cars for black first-class passengers. Although the accommodations were rarely first-class in fact, the United States Supreme Court soon affirmed the constitutionality of these so-called separate but equal accommodations.

Wells began her activism suing railroads, but she built her legend fighting lynching. Early on, like many respectable black folk, she tried to distance herself from the terror of lynching by thinking about it as only a sort of disproportionate justice inflicted on black criminals. That changed in 1892 with the triple lynching of Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart.

Moss was a good friend of Wells's. He was president of People's Cooperative Grocery, which served the predominantly black Memphis community along Walker Avenue, known as “the Curve.” People's Grocery was new competition to a store run by W. H. Barrett. Barrett was white, but he relished the profits from selling to blacks in the racially mixed neighborhood around the Curve.

The violence that ended in the lynching of Tom Moss started with a fight between black boys and white boys over a game of marbles. Angry that his son had come out badly, Cornelius Hearst took a horsewhip to one of the black kids. A group of angry black fathers then gathered outside Hearst's home and incidentally next to People's Grocery.

As tension built, W. H. Barrett exploited rumors of impending black violence to convince a local judge to issue arrest warrants for “agitators” who gathered around People's Grocery. Armed with the knowledge that the warrants would be served, Barrett then spread the rumor that a white mob was intending to raid the store.

The managers of People's Grocery got their guns and prepared for the attack. When they saw a group of armed men approaching the back of the store at around ten o'clock that night, their fears seemed confirmed. The advancing group, none of them in uniform, actually was deputized and charged with serving the warrant instigated by W. H. Barrett. There is dispute about who fired the first shot. But it is clear that three deputies were wounded in the exchange of gunfire.

While bystanders fled, the remaining deputies sent for reinforcements, and the occupants of People's Grocery were arrested. Tom Moss was not among them but was later described as the ringleader and the person who shot at least one of the deputies. Moss claimed to be at home with his wife during the gunfight, and another man was initially charged with firing the shot later blamed on Moss. The white press depicted the event as a bloody riot and ambush by a murderous band of Negroes. Scores of white men were deputized. They arrested at least thirty alleged conspirators.

Fearing mob action, a black militia guarded the jail for two nights. But on the third night, the black guard dissolved. With the jail unguarded, a crowd seized Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, dragged them to a spot north of town, beat them, gouged their eyes, and finally—mercifully—shot them.

Lynching was nothing new in in this era. But the killing of Moss, McDowell and Stewart was different. It was the first time in Wells's experience that “respectable” black folk had been lynched. None of the men had any sort of criminal record and all of them worked in jobs that were essentially middle-class. The killing of Tom Moss also was intensely personal for Wells. She was godmother to his daughter and she wrote later that Moss and his family were her best friends in Memphis.

Black reaction to the lynching ranged from outrage to fearful talk of leaving the city for destinations as varied as Liberia and newly opening territory in Oklahoma. Wells was not in Memphis the night of the lynching, but when she returned, she wrote an angry editorial charging that Memphis had “demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he desires to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.” Wells condemned the city's attempt to disarm black citizens and ban gun sales to blacks while deputizing white men and boys to enter black homes, seize firearms, and help themselves “to ammunition without payment.”
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The lynching provoked wide outrage in the black press, with angry calls for justice and even vengeance. The
Kansas City American Citizen
editorialized that the
lynching “called for something more than patient endurance—it calls for dynamite and bloodshed.” The
Langston City Herald
asked, “what race or class of people on God's footstool would tolerate the continual slaughter of its own without a revolt?”

Wells joined the charge, expanding her criticism to the federal government and black federal officeholders, asking, “where are our leaders when the race is being burnt, shot, and hanged?” This was partly a condemnation of vanishing federal support for blacks under the collapse of Reconstruction, but it also targeted the handful of Negroes on the public payroll who feared that agitation would jeopardize their positions.

At a practical level, Wells responded in familiar fashion. Prompted by the inability of even well-intentioned public officials to stop eminent violent threats, she explained later, “I had bought a pistol first thing after Tom Moss was lynched.” She was in some sense tardy in this precaution. Over in Nashville, eighteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois, a freshman at Fisk University, observed in 1886 that his classmates, shaken by the rising tide of lynchings, were habitually armed whenever they ventured into the city.
3

Wells now developed a sharper critique of the nature and impulse for lynching. She had seen black criminals lynched. But this was different.

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 lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved to die anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.

But Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and [Will] Lee Stewart had been lynched . . . with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; and they had committed no crime against white women. This is 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.”

During the period that white America dubbed the Gay Nineties, lynchings of blacks in the South averaged about two per week. Wells's increasingly cutting assessment of the terror launched her into dangerous territory. She started suggesting that frequent claims of rape by white women proved too much. “Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the
Free Speech
. . . on the same old racket, the alarm about raping white women. If southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”
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The implication here was incendiary. The
Memphis Commercial
fulminated that southern white men would not long tolerate “the obscene intimations” of Wells's editorial. It was an accurate assessment.

Wells was in New York when white men went on the warpath. Before it was over, Wells's coeditor at the
Memphis
Free Speech
was run out of town, and the paper's offices were destroyed. Wells was warned that it would hazard her life to return. She decided to stay in New York after learning that some of the black men of Memphis were risking their lives by organizing an armed squad to protect her.

Ironically, being exiled from Memphis launched Wells onto the broader stage of New York City and dramatically widened the audience for her work. With her investment in the
Memphis Free Speech
consumed by the mob, Wells joined T. Thomas Fortune's
New York Age
, where her reporting would garner national and international recognition.
5

From New York, Wells's attack was unrelenting. She struck hard at the myth that lynching was the product of the lawless element. She hammered the shibboleth of black rapists, arguing that the facts clearly viewed would “serve . . . as a defense for the Afro-American Samsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.” Then, without the cover of euphemisms, she stated boldly that “there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law.”

Her most blistering tactic was to use white sources and reporting to make her case. She reveled in the report of Mrs. J. C. Underwood, an Ohio minister's wife who claimed she had been raped by a black man, then recanted, acknowledging the “strange fascination” the Negro had for her. She admitted to lying about the rape on the worry that she might have contracted venereal disease or become pregnant with a black child.

Wells found plenty of other fodder in the southern papers. In one short spate, the white Memphis press covered six cases of white women taking black lovers. From all across the South, Wells gathered stories showing poor, middle-class, and affluent white women, the prostitute and the physician's wife, as willing sexual partners with black men. She reprinted news of white women who had given birth to black children and refused to name the father. She gloried in a
Memphis Ledger
report in June 1892 decrying the circumstances of Lillie Bailey, “a rather pretty white girl, seventeen years of age, who . . . is the mother of a little coon” and refused to identify “the Negro who had disgraced her.” For Wells this demonstrated that the pretty white girl had some affection for the father of the “little coon.”
6

Along with her ever more incisive critique of lynch terror, Wells developed a keener sense of the necessity and value of defensive firearms. Celebrating the recent evidence of blacks defending themselves and preventing lynchings through armed self-defense in Jacksonville, Florida, and Paducah, Kentucky, she advanced her classic prescription for armed self-defense. “
The lesson this teaches and which every
Afro-American should ponder well, is that the Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home
. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”
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It was a bold prescription, perhaps even foolhardy. But Wells was keenly aware of the hazards. She understood firsthand from the lynching of Tom Moss the danger of drawing guns, only to be outnumbered and finally outgunned. But she also saw clearly the potential utility of firearms and the moral case for fighting back against violent aggressors. The implications of this simple insight, ancient in its roots, would resonate throughout her life's work.