Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (21 page)
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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon
Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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It was through journalism that I found the real me.
—IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT
Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, a young schoolteacher refused to move from the ladies’ car on the train on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. When she was removed from the train she sued—and she won, proving that a woman of color could make her voice heard. Although the decision was later overturned, Ida B. Wells-Barnett kept raising her voice, educating Americans and Europeans about the horrors of lynching and other social injustices that were being heaped on African Americans in the nineteenth century. Ida appeared at a time when the previous generation of black leaders who had led the fight for slavery was now too old to head a new battle to protect the freedoms promised by the Emancipation Proclamation. A new generation was needed and Ida was one who stepped into the breach. In her heyday, she was praised as the Joan of Arc of her people in the black press.
Ida wasn’t one to back down or compromise. She was tough and argumentative, and she clashed with several prominent African American leaders of the time for compromising instead of standing firm. She also clashed with various whites, including temperance advocate Frances Willard. “Temper . . . has always been my besetting sin,” she conceded. She owned newspapers and wrote articles at a time when most women were relegated to writing what was known then as the “women’s page.” She hyphenated her name at a time when most women automatically took their husband’s name. Living in Chicago, she started the first kindergarten for black children. Although she lost a race for the Illinois State Senate, just the fact that she ran, ten years after women won the vote, is a testament to her courage and ambition.
Ida B. Wells was the eldest of eight children, born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to James Wells, a carpenter, and Elizabeth “Lizzie Bell” Warrenton Wells, who were slaves on the Bolling plantation. Although the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed slaves held in the Confederate states, Holly Springs, where the family lived, changed hands between the Union and the Confederacy more than fifty times during the war. It wasn’t until the end of the Civil War that the entire Wells family was free.
When Ida was sixteen, yellow fever struck Mississippi, killing Ida’s parents and one of her siblings. Despite tongues wagging at the idea, Ida rose to the challenge of taking care of her remaining siblings and keeping the family together. She took the teacher certification exam and passed with flying colors. Despite the difficulties of raising her six siblings while teaching, Ida still managed to keep up her education, working her way through Shaw University during the summers. Ida knew that education was power, a way out of the backbreaking work of sharecropping and poverty. In 1881, however, she was expelled from Shaw. She never talked about what occurred, but she apparently did something that angered W. W. Hooper, the white president of the college. Ida refused to back down or apologize.
She decided to move to Memphis to live with her father’s stepsister along with several of her siblings. While living in Memphis, Ida availed herself of the social life that was available, taking in lectures, going to the theater, shopping at Menken’s Palatial Emporium, which boasted “Thirty Stores Under One Roof.” She was a regular customer at William’s bookstore, and whenever possible, she attended classes at Fisk University. She enjoyed going to church, not just the black churches but also the white ones, where she would sit in the segregated galleries to hear the sermon.
She started teaching at a country school in northern Mississippi just across the state line from the city. The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 that had banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color had just been declared unconstitutional, which led several railroad companies to start practicing segregation. Every day Ida rode the train to work but she never knew from one day to the next whether or not she would be ill-treated, until the day that the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company tried to force her to sit in the smoking car when she had paid for a first-class pass. Ida later wrote in her autobiography, “I refused, saying that the forward car closest to the locomotive was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies’ car, I proposed to stay.... The conductor tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggage man and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”
White passengers cheered the conductor as he removed Ida from the train. Black newspapers throughout the country reprinted her first article about her railroad court case. With the help of a second lawyer (she was suspicious that her first lawyer had taken money to throw the case) Ida won her lawsuit and was awarded five hundred dollars in damages. However, in 1887, the railroad company appealed the decision to the Tennessee Supreme Court and won, reversing the court’s decision. Ida was required to return the money and to pay two hundred dollars in damages to the railroad.
Ida’s teaching in Memphis schools led her to write articles for the
Evening Star
, a black-owned newspaper, about the inequalities between the separated black and white schools. She began writing for another local black newspaper, the
Memphis Free Speech
, where she eventually would become a co-owner and editor. In her editorials, Ida took on the violence against blacks, disfranchisement, the poor school system, and the failure of blacks to fight for their rights. She traveled the country getting subscribers. After she became a co-owner, Ida started printing the paper on pink paper so it would stand out.
Evening Star
, a black-owned newspaper, about the inequalities between the separated black and white schools. She began writing for another local black newspaper, the
Memphis Free Speech
, where she eventually would become a co-owner and editor. In her editorials, Ida took on the violence against blacks, disfranchisement, the poor school system, and the failure of blacks to fight for their rights. She traveled the country getting subscribers. After she became a co-owner, Ida started printing the paper on pink paper so it would stand out.
She was elected secretary of the Colored Press Association, where she received the nickname “the Princess of the Press.” Her writing style was simple and direct because, as she said in her autobiography,
The Crusade for Justice
, she “needed to help people with little or no schooling deal with problems in a simple, helpful way.” Eventually fired from her teaching job for writing about the inequalities between black and white schools, Ida became a full-time journalist.
The Crusade for Justice
, she “needed to help people with little or no schooling deal with problems in a simple, helpful way.” Eventually fired from her teaching job for writing about the inequalities between black and white schools, Ida became a full-time journalist.
In 1892, a longtime friend, Tom Moss, a respected black store owner, was lynched along with two of his friends after he defended his store against an attack by whites. Wells was outraged, particularly since nothing was done to bring the culprits to justice. She wrote a scathing series of editorials, encouraging black residents of Memphis to leave town and attacking the practice of lynching. She also encouraged those blacks who remained to boycott whiteowned businesses.
“Lynch’s Law,” which became corrupted to “lynch law” and then “lynching,” originated during the American Revolution when Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace, ordered punishment against those who supported the Tory cause. After the Civil War, lynching became a form of terrorism practiced by white mobs against mostly innocent blacks. Instead of waiting for due process of law, organized mobs would take the law into their own hands. Many of the victims, while being hung, were set on fire or shot.
Lynching was the preferred method to control the African American male population, to keep him in his place, basically poor and illiterate. Between 1880 and 1930, more than three thousand African Americans and some thirteen hundred whites were lynched in the United States. Nine times out of ten, the accused were arrested with no evidence, or what evidence there was turned out to be extremely circumstantial. Confessions were obtained under coercion. Many others were lynched for trivial offenses such as not paying a debt, disrespecting whites, or public drunkenness.
Ida wrote pamphlets exposing the horrors of lynching and defending the victims. She believed that lynching was the central issue facing blacks in the South. Although she wasn’t the first African American to speak out against lynching, she was the first to grain a broad audience. Ida realized that as long as lynching was seen as a way to protect white women’s virtue, black leaders couldn’t address it without sounding defensive or self-interested. However, black women could give effective testimony on the evils of lynching in the name of chivalry.
While Ida was in New York, the office of the
Free Speech
was destroyed by a mob and she was warned never to return to Memphis. Trying to avoid bloodshed, Ida did not return home, once she heard that black men had vowed to protect her. Instead she moved to Chicago, where she met Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent attorney and widower, whom she eventually married at the relatively advanced age of thirty-three. She also wrote for his newspaper, the
Chicago Conservator
. After their marriage she became owner and editor.
Free Speech
was destroyed by a mob and she was warned never to return to Memphis. Trying to avoid bloodshed, Ida did not return home, once she heard that black men had vowed to protect her. Instead she moved to Chicago, where she met Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent attorney and widower, whom she eventually married at the relatively advanced age of thirty-three. She also wrote for his newspaper, the
Chicago Conservator
. After their marriage she became owner and editor.
In 1895, she wrote “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States: 1892, 1893, and 1894,” which included all her research of the past few years. She started traveling the country asking for support in putting a stop to lynching. People began to ask her to speak at organization meetings and functions. She would spend the rest of her life writing and giving speeches throughout the country and in Europe.
Ida undertook two lecture tours of England at the request of British Quaker Catherine Impey. The goal was to convince the English of the horrors of lynching, since the United States and England had a special relationship. If England spoke out against lynching, perhaps politicians in America would take notice. While in England, Ida launched the London Anti-Lynching Committee. Ida’s tours were a great success, although it led to a rupture between her and one of her sponsors, when she refused to condemn the decision of a woman who fell in love with a man outside her race. She wrote about her tour for the
Daily Inter-Ocean
in Chicago, becoming the first black woman to be paid as a correspondent for a major white newspaper.
Daily Inter-Ocean
in Chicago, becoming the first black woman to be paid as a correspondent for a major white newspaper.
After the birth of her four children, Ida continued to lecture, taking her children with her, asking for babysitters at every stop on her lecture tour. Eventually the demands of motherhood kept Ida in Chicago but she continued to write and speak out about injustice. She refused to walk in the back in women’s suffrage parades because she was black and she fell out with Susan B. Anthony because she dared to get married and start a family instead of devoting herself solely to the cause of suffrage and the establishment of antilynching law.
Although busy raising her four children and her two stepchildren, she found the time to serve as secretary of the National Afro-American Council and she was part of a delegation to President William McKinley to seek justice after the lynching in South Carolina of a black postman. Unfortunately McKinley was too preoccupied by the Spanish-American War and its aftermath to give the matter much attention.
Ida remained active and militant for the rest of her life. She was a founding member of the NAACP, but she later withdrew her membership because she considered the organization not militant enough. In her writing and lectures, she often criticized middle-class blacks for not being active enough in helping the poor in the black community. Her militancy placed her out of sync with more moderate black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington, who were more willing to compromise with whites. Deciding to stick to local issues in the Chicago area, she worked with social reformer Jane Addams to defeat an attempt to segregate Chicago’s public school system. Ida became interested in the settlement movement, in particular the work that Jane Addams had done with Hull House, the first of its kind in the United States. Hull House was essentially a neighborhood center that catered to the recent immigrants in its neighborhoods.
In 1910, she helped found and became president of the Negro Fellowship League, which established a settlement house in Chicago to serve the many African Americans newly arrived from the South. It offered lectures and classes, as well as a kindergarten, a summer day camp, and a meeting place for black women’s clubs and community organizations. To help support the settlement house, she worked for the city as a probation officer, donating most of her salary to the organization. Unfortunately, due to competition from other groups and her own poor health, the league closed its doors in 1920.
Ida started to write her autobiography,
The Crusade for Justice
, after meeting a young woman who admitted not knowing why Ida was important. Most of Ida’s antilynching work had taken place in the 1890s, before the current generation was born. The newer generation cared less about the struggle. Unfortunately Ida died of uremia poisoning in 1931, at the age of sixty-eight, before the book was finished. In fact she left off not in the middle of a sentence but a word. Edited by her daughter Alfreda Duster, who had saved all her mother’s papers, the book languished for years unable to find a publisher. It was finally published in 1970, helped by the burgeoning interest in African American and women’s history. Ida and her husband’s headstone is engraved with the phrase “Crusaders for Justice.”
The Crusade for Justice
, after meeting a young woman who admitted not knowing why Ida was important. Most of Ida’s antilynching work had taken place in the 1890s, before the current generation was born. The newer generation cared less about the struggle. Unfortunately Ida died of uremia poisoning in 1931, at the age of sixty-eight, before the book was finished. In fact she left off not in the middle of a sentence but a word. Edited by her daughter Alfreda Duster, who had saved all her mother’s papers, the book languished for years unable to find a publisher. It was finally published in 1970, helped by the burgeoning interest in African American and women’s history. Ida and her husband’s headstone is engraved with the phrase “Crusaders for Justice.”
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