SOURCE: Braxton, Joanne M. “Crusader for Justice: Ida B. Wells.” In Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition, pp. 102-138. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

[In the following chapter from her full-length study of a number of autobiographical narratives written by African-American women, Braxton analyzes Wells-Barnett's Crusade for Justice both as an historical memoir and a confessional.]

Who shall say that such a work accomplished by one woman exiled and maligned by that community among whom she had so long and so valiantly labored, bending every effort to the upbuilding of the manhood and womanhood of all races, shall not place her in the front rank of philanthropists, not only of the womanhood of this race, but among those laborers of all ages and all climes?

—G. B. Mossell (1894)

The importance of black autobiography as literature and history is well documented. The historian John Blassingame views black autobiography as “a counterweight to the white historian's caricature of black life,” possessing a “therapeutic value” for both authors and readers, “a vehicle blacks used to express their true feelings without having them distorted by whites.” One of the “mainsprings of the black novel,” autobiography has also been “one of the major forums of black protest, a chief source of adequate historical information, and a link in the black literary tradition.”¹ In The American Autobiography, the literary critic Albert E. Stone suggests that “the best place to start to understand autobiography as a cultural act is with history,” that is to say, “historical consciousness speaks out of a singular experience, for some particular social group, to a wider audience. This … articulation is at once an act of perception and creation. Autobiography is, simply and profoundly, personal history.”²

Like The Education of Henry Adams (1907) or The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1968), Ida B. Wells's Crusade for Justice represents a posthumously published autobiography by a well-known public figure. Wells employs the medium of the historical memoir, a subgenre of autobiography dominated almost entirely by men, to create her lasting version of the self.

“The memoir,” James Cox asserts, “is a category of autobiography that needs attention,” part of the “lost ground” of American literature. “There is a distinct tiresomeness about the ease with which literary critics assure themselves that ‘mere’ fact has nothing to do with the art of autobiography. The truth or falsity of autobiography is thereby subordinated to the creativity, the design, ‘the inner’ truth of the narrative.” Cox observes, moreover, that “autobiographies devoted to the emotional consciousness of the writer have been much more subject to investigation than the memoir, particularly the memoir of a well-known public figure.”³ Thus, Wells's Crusade for Justice, as the memoir of a well-known public figure who is also a black woman, constitutes part of the “lost ground” of Afro-American literary tradition. It does much to establish continuity within black female autobiographical tradition, for this text has distinct characteristics common to both nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographies by black American women. The title Crusade for Justice refers primarily to Wells's recollections of her public life, but it also borrows from the confessional mode of autobiography to allow Wells the latitude to discuss her experience of marriage and family as it influenced her work and public life. Therefore, the “confessional” aspect is more fully developed in Crusade than in most historical memoirs.

In at least one respect, Wells departs from the traditional autobiographical stance of an older person looking back and settling accounts;⁴ she is not a wise and paternal elder, some “articulate hero” looking back at the end of a quest fulfilled. In Crusade, the outraged mother of the slave narrative emerges in the personal myth of a “fiery reformer, feminist, and race leader.”⁵ Speaking as the outraged mother who carries her nursing son on an antilynching speaking tour, Wells's autobiographical posture is that of a protector of black manhood and a nurturer and defender of black womanhood. Marked by unpredictable shifts in narrative movement similar to those found in earlier autobiographies by black American women, Crusade emphasizes the public sphere more in the first half of the narrative, and home and family life more in the second, with a perceptible break at Chapter 30, “A Divided Duty.” Although Stephen Butterfield argues that Crusade represents “the slave narrative in its purest and truest light,” this autobiography is organized according to more sophisticated principles than the slave narrative, and the sensibility is a broadened one.⁶ Although Wells deemphasizes her personal life in order to focus on her public career and achievements, Crusade for Justice qualifies as what James Olney calls a “duplex” autobiography in that Wells gives the reader enough of a view of her domestic sphere to round out what she presents of herself as a public person.

The structure of Crusade for Justice, like that of many autobiographies, is chronological rather than thematic or topical. Organized into forty-six short chapters, the memoir has the same “disconnected” quality of many women's narratives.⁷ Although it begins with Wells's recounting of her painful adolescence, the autobiographical “I” shifts to the viewpoint of the mature young woman fighting against lynching, then to that of an older woman wise in many ways, looking back on her life, ordering her experience in the recreation of the self.

Part of its intrinsic cultural value is that Crusade for Justice presents prime source material for speculation on the role of race and sex in the development of Wells's psychosocial identity and her autobiographical point of view. In his Life History and the Historic Movement, Erik Erikson defines the autobiographer's psychosocial identity primarily in relation to “the personal coherence of the individual and the group.” Erikson postulates that “one must first ask oneself under what circumstances the memoirs were written, what their intended purpose was, and what form they assumed. Only then can one proceed to judge the less conscious motivations, which may have led the autobiographer to emphasize selectively some experiences and omit other equally decisive ones … to correct what might spoil the kind of immortality he has chosen for himself.”⁸ Certainly such questions must be asked of Wells's autobiography, which was written toward the end of her career and her life, when she might have been susceptible to such “less conscious motivations.” And if Erikson had read Crusade for Justice, he might have criticized it as one of those “autobiographies … written at certain late stages of life for the purpose of recreating oneself in the image of one's method.”⁹

Wells began her autobiography in 1928; she died in 1934, leaving her work in midsentence. According to Alfreda M. Duster, her youngest child and editor of the posthumously published autobiography:

Ida B. Wells really wrote her own autobiography beginning in 1928. Our home had a large dining room with a huge dining table that could be expanded by putting “leaves” where the halves were pulled apart. That table was extended to its fullest length and was covered with papers, notes, books, etc.

She spent most of her days there, except when she was attending meetings, giving lectures, or answering requests for help from people in trouble, which were many.

She wrote the preface and the first three chapters by hand, writing and re-writing, then she secured the services of my brother's secretary, Miss Sinclair, for the rest of the chapters or re-typed at the next session.¹⁰

Although the editors at the University of Chicago Press supplied the book and chapter titles (since Wells did not), the manuscript was otherwise printed “just as she wrote it,” partly because the editor was aware that as Wells's daughter, anything she wrote would be suspect. Thus the text may be regarded as essentially Wells's own, although the published work represents an impressive feat of mother-daughter bonding and personal and political commitment spanning two generations. Crusade for Justice is a family and community document as well as the celebration of an individual triumph.

In Duster's words, “My role was a determination to see that this book was published. I knew it was a valuable story—one that should be published by a press which had nation-wide and even international distribution facilities, and I would not settle for less. So I just kept seeking and sending, and when the manuscript was returned, I just kept looking for another publisher.” According to Duster, the cycle of rejection started shortly after her mother's death and went on for about thirty-five years. “I knew the story should be told,” she wrote in answer to my query. “I knew it had significance, and I wanted it published … if I'd given up and put the manuscript somewhere and never tried, it would never have been available.” But Duster's true role extended beyond a determination to see her mother's autobiography published. For three years after the book was accepted, she worked under the supervision of the historian John Hope Franklin, “reading, travelling all over the country, verifying what mother had written from memory by facts and figures, articles, books, newspapers, correspondence, etc.”¹¹ In his foreword, Franklin attests to Duster's scrupulous editing:

Although her interest in the subject is understandably deep and her knowledge of the things about which her mother writes is great, Mrs. Duster has not intruded herself into the story that is, after all, the story of Ida B. Wells. She has accurately perceived her role as an understanding and sympathetic editor, scrupulously avoiding the pitfalls of filial subjectivity.¹²

Where an error or discrepancy occurs, Duster includes a note of correction, but her concern with historical accuracy does not intrude; the reader can almost hear Ida B. Wells through the immediacy of the text. This sense of presence represents one of the central paradoxes of Crusade for Justice, the dependence of the deceased mother on the living daughter for the revelation and publication of her autobiography.

Presumably, therefore, Duster had some voice in the selection of the title and subtitle, which were not supplied by the autobiographer. The title, Crusade for Justice, signals the central concerns and forecasts the dominant metaphors and “necessary fictions” of the text; it also suggests a holy war, a figure of thought that runs throughout Wells's narrative. The subtitle, The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, indicates the intention to minimize the autobiographer's personal life in order to portray her participation in a vast historical drama; Crusade for Justice is clearly presented as the story not only of Ida B. Wells but also of her times.

Duster's introduction occupies a crucial position, following the foreword by John Hope Franklin and preceding Wells's own preface. Unlike the authenticating subtexts of nineteenth-century slave narratives, which seem to challenge or undermine the narrator's authorial control, the Duster introduction engages in a kind of literary call and response with Wells's preface and the larger text, resulting in a remarkable resonance between Crusade for Justice and its authenticating subtexts. Duster begins her introduction by quoting Norman B. Wood's The White Side of a Black Subject:

God has raised up a modern Deborah in the person of Miss Ida B. Wells, whose voice has been heard throughout England and the United States … pleading as only she can plead for justice and fair treatment for her people. … we believe God delivered her from being lynched at Memphis, that by her portrayal of the burnings at Paris, Texas, Texarkana, Arkansas and elsewhere she might light a flame of righteous indignation, in England and America which by God's grace, will never be extinguished until a Negro's life is as safe in Mississippi and Tennessee as in Massachusetts or Rhode Island.¹³

Duster asserts that Wood's “was not an unusual description” of Wells, “who was described over and over again as militant, courageous, determined, impassioned, and aggressive.”¹⁴ In the remainder of the first paragraph, Duster authenticates her mother's slave birth, her uncommon parentage and upbringing, and much of the factual content of the early chapters of Crusade.

But Duster does more than attest to the truth value of her mother's narrative; by quoting a white author who likens her mother to Deborah, a prophetess and judge among the Hebrews of the Old Testament, she participates in the mythmaking process. Like the Old Testament heroine, who “arose a mother in Israel” to lead an army against the enemies of her people, Ida B. Wells led the crusade against lynching, full of outrage and indignation, going where men feared to tread. Thus Duster's rhetorical strategy works partly because she directs the reader's attention away from herself as authenticator, and because she contributes to the development of Wells's myth. Near the end of her introduction, Duster forecasts and softens the “strained analogy” that opens her mother's preface, as she supports Wells's personal identification with Joan of Arc:

In the preface to her autobiography she mentions that a young lady compared her to Joan of Arc. The analogy is, at best, strained, but the odds against [Wells] were in many ways greater. True enough, Joan was a peasant girl in a time when peasants and girls had nothing to say to the ruling class in France. But Ida B. Wells was a black woman born into slavery who began carrying the torch against lynching in the very South bent upon the degradation of the blacks.¹⁵

The torch of righteous indignation carried in the crusade against the barbaric practice of lynching becomes one of the central metaphors of Wells's text.

Wells's own preface affirms the “holy war” motif as she begins with the reference to Joan of Arc in an indirect advancement of a statement of her autobiographical purpose and intention:

A young woman recently asked me to tell her of my connection with the lynching agitation which was started in 1892. She said she was at a YWCA vesper service when the subject for discussion was Joan of Arc, and each person was asked to tell of someone they knew who had traits of character resembling this French heroine and martyr. She was the only colored girl present, and not wishing to lag behind the others, she named me. She was then asked to tell why she thought I deserved such mention. She said, “Mrs. Barnett, I couldn't tell why I thought so.”¹⁶

Wells's identification with Joan of Arc recalls the preface to Sojourner Truth's Narrative where Truth evokes the same image; thus Wells revises and recasts Truth's chosen historical metaphor. Wells underscores her historical intention as she builds her personal myth of self:

When she told me she was twenty-five years old, I realized that one reason she did not know was because the happenings about which she inquired took place before she was born. It is therefore for the young who have so little of our history recorded that I am for the first time in my life writing about myself. I am all the more constrained to do this because there is such a lack of authentic race history of Reconstruction times written by a Negro himself.

(Crusade, 3-4)

Moreover, Wells's preface advances a historical association with Frederick Douglass, an association often reinforced in the text. Wells writes:

We have Frederick Douglass's history of slavery as he knew and experienced it. But of the storm and stress immediately after the Civil War, of the Ku Klux Klan, of ballot stuffing, wholesale murders of Negroes who tried to exercise their newfound rights as free men and citizens, the carpetbag invasion about which the South published much that is false, and the Negroes' political life in that era—our race has little of its own that is definite or authentic.

(Crusade, 4)

The autobiographer's goal is clearly one of definition, documentation, and authentication; her story is intended not only as her own but as the story of her people and her times. She presents her life as a representative and symbolic one.

Wells's documentary mode is signaled by the form of the “linear narrative,” which is heavily influenced by journalism and reportage, and authenticated by quotes from newspapers, letters, and “other verifiable, external records.” Yet another clue concerns the autobiographer's “attention to chronology and causes,” and her brooding historical consciousness, which seems to pervade every word.¹⁷ In Crusade for Justice, Wells attempts to compensate for a public image frequently maligned in the white press. Like the fugitive slaves, Wells feels compelled to tell her story from her own point of view. She wants to set the record straight.

The development of Wells's consciousness resembles the growth of Harriet “Linda Brent” Jacobs's as it unfolds in a series of autobiographical turning points, which might also be viewed as autobiographical “cover memories.” A cover memory, according to Erik Erikson, is “a roughly factual event that has come to symbolize in condensed form a complex of ideas, affects and memories … living on in adulthood” as an “account to be settled.”¹⁸ The narrative movement of Crusade for Justice proceeds from one cover memory to the next; thus, “settling accounts” becomes an important figure of thought and a locus of thematic meaning in the text.

As in many other autobiographies by black women, childhood receives scant treatment; Wells treats her childhood in fewer than fifteen pages. While these memories seem dim, what Wells recalls from childhood prefigures a motif of central importance in the later text: the division between public and private duty. Born into slavery, Wells's “earliest recollections” are of reading the newspaper to her father and “an admiring group of his friends.” Of her father, she writes, “He was interested in politics and I heard the words of the Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant. I dimly knew that it meant something fearful, by the way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was at a political meeting.” Wells portrays her mother as a “deeply religious woman” who “won the prize for regular attendance at Sunday school” and taught her children “the work of the home” as well as the virtue of literacy as a tool of liberation. “She was not forty when she died, but she had borne eight children and brought us up with a strict discipline that many mothers who had had educational advantages have not exceeded. She used to tell us how she had been beaten by slave owners and the hard times she had as a slave” (Crusade, 9). Jim and Lizzie Wells provide for Ida a direct contact with an oppressive slave past. Jim reinforces the connection of freedom, literacy, and struggle, while Lizzie triumphs as nurturer, protector, and defender of her family.

The young Ida B. Wells does not understand the implications of everything that she sees and experiences. The narration in the early pages of the autobiography by the mature Ida B. Wells profits from the child's point of view; although incidents narrated seem randomly chosen, Wells endows each “cover memory” with symbolic significance. The feminist critic Patricia Spacks argues that attitudes of many women autobiographers toward adolescence differ from those of men in that women tend to remember adolescence with a kind of “nostalgic pleasure,” but that black women writing autobiography do not fit this model: They typically have tragically short childhoods. The black woman autobiographer typically substitutes a concern for survival for the flirtations and diversions of traditional “white” adolescence.¹⁹

The death of Wells's parents during a yellow fever epidemic propels the teenage girl into a world of adult reality. Reborn into a world of “Hard Beginnings,” Wells is suddenly charged with the responsibilities of an adult. In presenting this experience, the autobiographer employs both the inquiring mind of the historian and the selectivity of the artist. Wells's narration of her conversation with the conductor of the train that took her home develops the myth of the stalwart “Christian soldier,” who serves family and community under the most adverse circumstances. She finds ample opportunities for heroism in her everyday life and possesses the courage necessary to fulfill a heroic role:

It was a freight train. No passenger trains were running or needed. And the caboose in which I rode was draped in black for two previous conductors who had fallen victim to this dreaded disease. The conductor who told me this was sure that I had made a mistake to go home. I asked him why he was running the train when he knew he was likely to get the fever as had those others for whom the car was draped. He shrugged his shoulders and said that somebody had to do it. “That is exactly why I am going home. I am the oldest of seven living children. There's nobody but me to look after them now. Don't you think I should do my duty, too?”

(Crusade, 12)

In choosing these images and metaphors, Wells, like many other twentieth-century autobiographers, accentuates her adolescent performance. She also conforms to this pattern by diminishing the importance of the actions of her siblings in this crisis. “There were six of us left, and I the oldest, was only fourteen years old. After being a happy, light-hearted school-girl, I suddenly found myself at the head of a family” (Crusade, 12). Wells's recognition that she will have to rely on personal resources parallels that of Harriet Jacobs. Like the fugitive slaves, Wells achieves self-reliance by facing hardship. Reflecting the values of the slave narrative, Ida struggles to keep her family together, even after well-meaning friends and neighbors offer to take the children in:

I said that it would make my mother and father turn over in their graves to know their children had been scattered like that and that we owned the house and if the Masons would help find work, I would take care of them. Of course they scoffed at the idea of a butterfly fourteen-year-old schoolgirl trying to do what it had taken the combined effort of mother and father to do. …

I took the examination for a country schoolteacher and had my dress lengthened, and I got a school six miles out in the country.

(Crusade, 16)

In striving for self-sufficiency, the young woman unconsciously oversteps the boundaries of community-sanctioned propriety. The death of Wells's parents and her efforts to keep the family together precipitate an adolescent identity crisis, for Ida rebels against her perceived lack of power and an unwritten code of social etiquette designed to protect young black women from the sexual advances of white men.

For example, after Wells's father had died, the family physician, a friendly white man, had locked up $300 of Jim Wells's money for safekeeping, and sent for Ida, the oldest child. When Ida returned to Holly Springs, the doctor made arrangements to have the money transferred to her. This conscientious act of decency leads to a confrontation:

But someone said that I had been downtown inquiring for Dr. Gray shortly after I had come from the country. They heard him tell my sister he would get the money, meaning my father's money, and bring it to us that night. It was easy for that type of mind to deduce and spread that already, as young as I was, I had been heard asking white men for money and that was the reason I wanted to live there by myself with the children.

As I look back at it now I can perhaps understand the type of mind which drew such conclusions. And no one suggested that I was laying myself open to gossiping tongues.

(Crusade, 17)

This negative interaction impresses the young Ida B. Wells with an awareness of her sexual identity as well as her social powerlessness. Here Wells's ingrained concept of duty to family conflicts with the conventional notions of ideal womanhood espoused by her community. By demanding to be allowed to stand as the head of her family, Wells had unintentionally violated the racial and sexual etiquette of her community, which dictated that respectable young black women, white men, and money did not mix. Generally, the community did what it could do to discourage its women from having anything to do with white men; this conservative behavior served to minimize the potential for violence to some degree. Reinforcing the “hometraining” she had received from gentler hands, this incident helped both to form and to transform Ida's identity.

Outraged at the unjust accusation, Wells becomes even more set in her ways. In relating this experience in the pages of her autobiography, Wells introduces the idea of identity formation through conflict, a motif that can be linked to the literary strategy of settling accounts, as the autobiographer moves from one psychological turning point to the next.

The early narrative treatment of another incident, which occurred in 1884, clearly demonstrates the growth of what Erikson might view as a “pattern of analogous events … that combine to suggest a plausible direction.”²⁰ Here a defiant Wells confronts the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad with regard to its “color policy”:

But ever since the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill by the United States Supreme Court … there had been efforts all over the South to draw the color line on the railroads.

When the train started and the conductor came along to collect tickets, he took my ticket, then handed it back to me and told me that he could not take my ticket there. I thought that if he didn't want the ticket that I wouldn't bother about it and so went on reading. In a little while when he finished taking tickets, he came back and told me that I would have to go into another car. I refused, saying that the forward car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies car, I proposed to stay. He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth into the back of his hand.

I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he already had been badly bitten, he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.

(Crusade, 18-19)

This “cover memory” contributes to a pattern in the development of Wells's consciousness. The outraged young school-teacher with her teeth in the back of the conductor's hand is one of the selves of the autobiographer. In Crusade for Justice Wells performs on a historical stage, seeking a larger audience than that of the white “ladies and gentlemen” in the train car. She authenticates her narrative elaborately, quoting one of her many subtexts, a headline from the Memphis Commercial Appeal that read: “Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad—What it Cost to Put a Colored School Teacher in a Smoking Car—Verdict for $500.” Eventually, the railroad appealed the case to the state supreme court, which reversed the findings of the lower court, and ordered Wells to pay court costs. Even so, Wells's strategic inclusion of this incident in her “authenticating narrative” strengthened her posture as a crusader for justice.

Never enthusiastic about teaching, Wells found the profession too confining; she felt stifled and isolated. In the chapter titled “Iola,” she writes: “The confinement and monotony began to grow distasteful. The correspondence I had built up in newspaper work gave me an outlet through which to express the real ‘me’” (Crusade, 31). Journalism propels Wells out of teaching, as her outrage flares into another, more public conflict with community leaders. As a writer and editor for the Memphis Free Speech, Wells writes an editorial that attacks the morals of Memphis teachers. This sparks a dispute that embarrasses her employers on the Memphis School Board and contributes to the suicide of a black female teacher who had allegedly been involved in an affair with a white lawyer employed by the same board. Wells's public revelations were not news to the rest of the community, but she had disrupted a delicate balance of race relations by revealing a situation about which community leaders had agreed to keep quiet.

Losing her job as a result of the controversy, Wells becomes totally involved in publishing. As an investigative reporter, she continues to define her identity through the adversary relationship. Publishing provides Wells with a wider audience and greater opportunities for identity-defining experiences. Thus, early in Crusade, Wells reveals her established pattern of forming her identity through public conflict.

In 1892, the lynching of three black Memphis citizens stirs Wells's moral indignation, and her reaction places her in a position of national prominence. Wells's autobiographical response to the “Lynching at the Curve” proves Robert Stepto's assertion that “personal history may be created through immersion in an elaborately authenticated historical event.” By re-creating this historical event as an “act of language,” Wells elevates it to the equivalent of metaphor in what Stepto calls “rhetorical usefulness.”²¹ As an event, the “Lynching at the Curve” lives on in Wells's autobiographical consciousness as a “supreme account to be settled.”

One day some colored and white boys quarreled over a game of marbles and the colored boys got the better of the fight which followed. The father of the white boys whipped the victorious colored boy, whose father and friends pitched in to avenge the grown man's flogging of a colored boy. The colored men won the fight, whereupon the white father and grocery keeper swore out a warrant for the arrest of the colored victors.

Sunday morning's paper came out with lurid headlines telling how officers of the law had been wounded while in the discharge of their duties, hunting up criminals whom they had been told were harbored in the People's Grocery Company, this being “a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort of thieves and thugs.” So ran the description in the leading white journals of Memphis of this successful effort of decent black men to carry on a legitimate business.

(Crusade, 48-49)

Wells used this case as a prime example of the economic motivation behind some lynchings. According to Wells's analysis, the quarrel over the game of marbles was designed to involve black men in a dispute that would cost them their business.

The “Tennessee Rifles,” a black militia group, guarded the jail where the black men were held as long as they felt the white “officers” were in danger of dying. When they left their post, after deciding that tensions were easing, a group of white men crept into the jail at night, carried the black prisoners a mile outside the city, and “horribly shot them to death” (Crusade, 50). The lynching had a profound effect on Wells. Although she was in Natchez when the incident occurred, she knew all three men personally. That week, in the newspaper Free Speech, Wells carried words of advice for Memphis blacks:

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. There is therefore only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.

(Crusade, 52)

This editorial, which Wells excerpted in her autobiography, precipitated a series of events that led to the smashing of Wells's press and her forced exile. Following Wells's advice, blacks disposed of their property and left Memphis, bringing business to a virtual standstill:

Music houses had more musical instruments, sold on the installment plan, thrown back on their own hands than they could find storage for. Housewives found a hitherto unknown shortage of help and resorted to the expedient of paying their servants only half the wages due them at the end of the week.

(Crusade, 53)

The article that led to the final destruction of Wells's press pointed to the root cause of many lynchings. Some few months after the lynching at “the curve,” Wells wrote the following in a May 1892 editorial in Free Speech:

Eight Negroes lynched since the last issue of the Free Speech. Three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women. If Southern white men are not careful … a conclusion will be reached which will be very dangerous to the moral reputation of their women.

In response to this editorial, a white rival paper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, called on “chivalrous” white men to avenge this insult to the honor of white womanhood. As a result, the type and furnishings of Wells's Free Press were demolished, and a note was left behind saying that anyone attempting to publish the paper again would be killed. Wells received the information while attending a series of conferences in the Northeast. She had lost her paper, and been threatened and exiled from her home, for telling the truth as she saw it.

This experience, perhaps more than any other, contributed to Ida B. Wells's self-image; it reinforced her sense of self as a black woman who did her Christian duty by decrying the evils of lynching and the moral decay at its root. According to Erikson, “Leadership is prominently characterized by the choice of the proper place, the exact moment, and the specific issues that help” to make a point “momentously.”²² Wells liberated her power to effect change and became a woman of action in response to a given historical moment and a specific issue, lynching. In psychosocial terms, her lifelong struggle against lynching became what Erikson would have called a defense against “identity confusion.”

As an investigative reporter, Wells published several booklets on lynching. The first of these, Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases, originally appeared as an article in the June 25, 1892, issue of T. Thomas Fortune's New York Age, the paper on which Wells worked after her forced departure from Memphis. In Southern Horrors, Wells established the falseness of the rape charge as an alleged cause of lynching and exposed many of these “rapes” as mere cover-ups for interracial love affairs between black men and white women. She also pointed to a deeper irony:

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succembs to the smiles of white women.²³

Decrying the sexual double standard at the root of America's race war, Wells recognized the issue as one embedded in cultural and sexual stereotypes of black men, as well as conventional (and often false) notions of white womanhood. Although lynching proved an effective sanction against sex between black men and white women, white men were rarely punished for their sexual exploitation of black women. Such interracial liaisons degraded not only black women but white women, who perceived the features of a husband or a brother in a young mulatto face.

It was during this early part of her public career that the “Sage of Anacostia” became interested in Wells's work:

Frederick Douglass came from his home in Washington to tell me what a revelation of existing conditions this article had been to him. He had been troubled by the increasing number of lynchings, and had begun to believe that there was an increasing lasciviousness on the part of Negroes. He wrote a strong preface to the pamphlet which I afterward published embodying these facts. This was the beginning of a friendship with the “Sage of Anacostia” which lasted until the day of his death, three years later. I have never ceased to be thankful for this contact with him.

(Crusade, 72-73)

Despite Wells's assertion and Douglass's authentication of her life and work, there is no known evidence to suggest that he ever believed “there was an increasing lasciviousness on the part of Negroes.” The above passage illustrates a certain self-serving behavior that is characteristic of Wells's autobiographical persona, a form of posing that, when manifested in life, did not endear her to the leadership that moved forward to fill the void left by Douglass's passing. Even though the Wells assertion may be true, a more modest estimation of her contribution to Douglass's ideas would have been more persuasive to the cautious reader.

Douglass's preface to Southern Horrors, written at Wells's request, emerges as yet another key subtext in the interpretation of Wells's authenticating strategy. On October 17, 1892, Wells queried Douglass on stationery from the New York Age. “Dear Mr. Douglass,” she wrote, “I take the liberty of addressing you to ask if you will be so kind as to put in writing the encomiums you were pleased to lavish on my article on Lynch Law published in the June 25 issue of the Age.”²⁴ Wells wrote that she was “revising the matter for a pamphlet” and asked for a letter she could use as an introduction; the pamphlet later appeared as Southern Horrors. In 1895, Wells recycled Douglass's letter as an introduction to A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894.

Douglass's letter authenticated Wells's “moral sensibility” and the bravery of her response to the “persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people.” He also affirmed the significance of Wells's investigative reporting when he wrote, “There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the fact, and cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.”²⁵ In the view of many veterans of the antislavery movement, the struggle against lynching was a continuation of the fight for a freedom that would never be secure until blacks were able to exercise full civil rights without fear of reprisal. A spirit of black resistance metamorphosed into a budding nationalist consciousness, uniquely Afro-American in character. A contemporary of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Francis E. W. Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells contributed to the development of this black political awareness. In this endeavor, race, not sex, served as Wells's point of departure, for she knew that black women were oppressed primarily because they were black and not because they were women.

Continuing in her role as outraged mother and defender of the race, Wells produced A Red Record, her most substantial and best-known antilynching book. For this work, Wells collated only undisputed reports of lynching previously published in the reputable Chicago Tribune. Her analysis showed that a large percentage of the men and women lynched were innocent of any crime. She reported that blacks were lynched for wife beating, hog stealing, quarreling, “sassiness,” and even for no offense.

In her autobiography, Wells returns to the rape myth and gives the history of several cases that discredit it. One of the cases Wells cites is that of Edward McCoy, who was burned alive in Texarkana, Arkansas, after being accused of assaulting a white woman. “He was tied to a tree, the flesh cut from his body by men and boys, and after coal oil was poured over him, the woman he assaulted gladly set fire to him, and 15,000 persons saw him burn to death.” In this case, the woman involved was known to have been intimate with the man for “more than a year previous.” As she lit the pyre, McCoy “asked her if she would burn him after they had ‘been sweethearting’ so long.” Ironically, Wells writes, a “large majority of the ‘superior’ white men” responsible for the lynching were “reputed fathers of mulatto children” (Crusade, 93). Thus the McCoy case is paradigmatic of the lynching phenomenon and the sexual double standard at its root.

Often instigated by the alleged rape of a white woman, lynching assumed cruel and atrocious forms of murder and “slow death,” including mutilation, castration, and burning alive. As Wells systematically demonstrated, many of the men lynched were innocent of any crime. Conscious recognition of this fact and its culturally symbolic significance led Wells to a course of action that assured her rise to national and international prominence. She had seized upon the issue, time, and place.

Although the New York Age was on an exchange list with many white periodicals, Wells maintained that none of them commented on her investigative reporting. Initially, it seems, very little attention was paid to Wells in the white press; her support came from the black community. In 1892, the black women of Brooklyn and New York City gave Wells a testimonial that called immediate national attention to her antilynching activities. This event marked the beginning of Wells's public speaking career. Nowhere is Wells more modest in her autobiography than she appears in the chapter entitled “The Homesick Exile,” as she looks back on her first public speech:

When the committee told me that I had to speak I was frightened. I had been a writer, both as a correspondent and editor for several years. I had some little reputation as an essayist from schoolgirl days. … But this was the first time I had ever been called on to deliver an honest-to-goodness address.

After every detail of that horrible lynching affair was imprinted on my memory, I had to commit it all to paper, and so got up to read my story on that memorable occasion. As I described the cause of trouble at home my mind went back to the scenes of the struggle, to the thought of the friends who were scattered throughout the country, a feeling of loneliness and homesickness for the days and the friends that were gone came over me and I felt the tears coming.

(Crusade, 79)

Wells dates this 1892 testimonial as the beginning of the black women's club movement, thus asserting a founding role. She describes her early work in establishing clubs in New York, Boston, Providence, Newport, and New Haven. Following addresses by Wells in these cities, black women met to organize clubs such as the Women's Era Club of Boston and the Twentieth Century Club of New Haven. Wells's involvement in the black women's club movement should not be diminished, for it involved the active fusion of powerful influences: black feminism and black nationalism. The result of this fusion was the development of a race-centered, self-conscious womanhood in the form of the black women's club movement. Whereas the white woman's movement reflected her commitment to temperance and suffrage, the black woman's movement was born in the outrage of the slave mother and the struggle against lynching. Racial oppression, not sexism, was the primary issue. For an Ida B. Wells or a Frances E. W. Harper, a blow at lynching was a blow at racism and at the brutally enforced sexual double standard that pervaded the South. It was a defense of the entire race.

Through her antilynching activities, Wells made a unique contribution. The historian Gerda Lerner assesses Wells's leadership role in this way:

In the 1890's, under the leadership of Ida B. Wells, who initiated an international crusade against lynching, Negro women's clubs launched a national campaign against this evil, and challenged white club women to support them. An early example of the now familiar pattern of the white liberal, accused of racism by black friends, grew out of this antilynching campaign and involved Frances Willard, the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, whose earlier abolitionist convictions and interracial work were a matter of record. Mrs. Willard was hesitant and equivocal on the issue of lynching and defended the Southern record against accusations made by Ida B. Wells on her English speaking-tour. Severe attacks on her in the women's press and a protracted public controversy helped to move Mrs. Willard to a cautious stand in opposition to lynching. Black women continued to agitate this issue and to confront white women with a moral challenge of their confessed Christianity.²⁶

The conflict between Wells and Frances Willard recalls an earlier confrontation between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which (theoretically) guaranteed black men the right to vote with white men, but which, in effect, continued to deny the vote to women of any color. Douglass had been elected one of three vice-presidents of the American Equal Rights Association, founded with the aim of gaining suffrage for black men and for all women. When it became apparent what the ultimate outcome of the Fifteenth Amendment would be, Anthony led white women in withdrawing their support for the organization.

At the 1866 Albany convention of the association, Douglass had a serious clash with Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who accused him of “pushing one reform at the expense of another,” and the women began to talk of actively opposing any amendment that did not grant suffrage to women. With the enfranchisement of black men, the tentative alliance between profeminist black abolitionists and proabolition feminists dissolved into confusion. Douglass saw a need for continuing equal rights agitation and sought to extend the life of both the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Equal Rights Association until all blacks and women were granted full suffrage. Nevertheless, the 1866 convention ended in the dissolution of the American Equal Rights Association and in the formation of the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which did not address itself to black rights.

In the chapter of Crusade titled “Susan B. Anthony,” Wells takes up some of her arguments with NAWSA and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Although a member of NAWSA, Wells believed that the vote would change neither “women's nature nor the political situation” of the South (Crusade, 230). She also believed that white women would continue to vote the way their husbands did. Wells viewed a feminism that confirmed white women's racist attitudes as not only invalid for black women but as a dangerous threat to the entire race. Through the women's club movement and its antilynching campaign, Wells began to renew an old alliance with white women and to clarify the terms under which such cooperation would be acceptable to black women.

During this year, 1892, Wells began to receive what she interpreted as the “loyal endorsement and support” of the black press, but she was disappointed that the white press remained virtually untouched by her campaign. Through Peter Still, the black former Underground Railroad agent, she met Catherine Impey, editor of the Anti-Caste of Somerset, England, who was visiting with Quaker relatives in Philadelphia. Their meeting, Wells writes, “resulted in an invitation to England and the beginning of a worldwide campaign against lynching” (Crusade, 82). As Wells relates in her autobiography, she was visiting in the Washington home of Frederick Douglass when the invitation to go to England arrived. Her metaphor for this opportunity reaffirms her relationship to the narrative tradition of the fugitive slaves:

It seemed like an open door in a stone wall. For nearly a year I had been in the North, hoping to spread the truth and get moral support for a demand that those accused of crimes be given a fair trial and punished by law instead of by mob. Only in one city—Boston—had I been given a meager hearing, and the press was dumb. I refer, of course, to the white press, since it was the medium through which I hoped to reach the white people of the country, who alone could mold public sentiment.

(Crusade, 86)

Wells made two trips to England, one in 1893 and one in 1894, on both occasions seeking a larger, more receptive audience. She lectured throughout England and Scotland, and during the 1894 trip she served as overseas correspondent for the Inter-Ocean newspaper. Her lectures were well attended, and she generally received good coverage in the English press. Thus Wells internationalized her movement.

Employing the strategy of authentication used throughout the text, Wells quotes the Birmingham Daily Gazette of May 18, 1893, to describe a meeting of that same date:

Having given some particulars showing flimsy evidence on which people who afterwards were proven innocent were lynched, Miss Wells said that when the woman was black and the man who assaulted her was white the offender was not even punished by law. The white men of the South had forgotten entirely that in the war when their fathers and brothers were away the white women of the South had been in charge of the black men, against whose freedom their masters were fighting and not one black man was accused of betraying his trust.

(quoted in Crusade, 97)

Conscious of her historical connection with the abolition movement, “Miss Wells argued from the result of the antislavery agitation that British public opinion if properly aroused would have good effect on the people of the United States, and strengthen the hand of those in America who were desirous of putting an end to these cruel proceedings” (quoted in Crusade, 97-98). Wells knew that one way to get American papers to comment on lynching was to arouse public opinion abroad. Black abolitionists and former slaves had provided early models for this strategy. Wells simply followed the route of fugitive slaves, who used English public opinion to bring about an end to the cruelty and brutality of slavery. In fact, she was even received as the “honored guest” of Ellen Richards, the woman who had previously purchased the freedom of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.²⁷

In her public speeches and lectures in England, Wells continued to attack the racial and sexual myths believed by many Americans who condoned lynching, and she articulated the roots of the American race war. Additionally, she pointed out that women as well as men were lynched, often for violating the unspoken code of racial etiquette:

It is true they had read of lynchings and while they thought them dreadful had accepted the general belief that it was for terrible crimes perpetrated by Negro men upon white women. I read the account of that poor woman who was boxed up in a barrel and rolled down a hill in Texas, and asked if that lynching could be excused on the same ground.

(Crusade, 154)

Through this and similar examples, Wells demonstrated the cruelty and brutality of lynching and defeated the “threadbare notion” that whites lynch blacks because they rape white women. Moreover, Wells attested, some white women were “willing victims”:

I found that white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so whenever they could; these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women; even when the white women were willing victims.

(Crusade, 71)

It took courage for Wells to publish these radical statements, for here she attacked the heart of southern racial mythology. Wells's attitude toward interracial sexual relationships was determined by her belief that these relationships could not exist on a basis of social parity with same-race relationships. Rightly or wrongly, she viewed black men who accepted sexual favors from white women as “weak.” Relationships between black women and white men she viewed as one-way exploitation.

In Europe, Wells continued her established pattern of seeking and defining her identity through public conflict. In a chapter titled “An Indiscreet Letter” Wells treated the controversy surrounding her 1893 trip; she continued to settle “accounts outstanding.” Catherine Impey, one of Wells's English sponsors, made the mistake of sending an unsolicited love letter to an East Indian physician working in the anticaste movement in England. The horrified doctor gave the letter to Fyvie Mayo, who edited the Anti-Caste newspaper with Impey. Mayo reacted strongly, banishing Impey from the movement. Wells writes that her dismay increased when Mayo “insisted on the destruction of the entire issue of AntiCaste which had their names jointly as editors and demanded that I quit Miss Impey and go with her in an effort to carry on the work” (Crusade, 104). Although Wells agreed that Impey had been indiscreet, she saw no need to publicize the incident. She could not agree with Mayo's assessment “that Miss Impey was the type of maiden lady who used such work as an opportunity to meet and make advances to men” (Crusade, 104). The final blow came when “Dr. Ferdinands himself wrote and strongly condemned Wells for staying with Miss Impey” (Crusade, 105). Settling her account with Ferdinands, Wells notes, “Although I did not answer his letter I often wonder if he realized his mistake in passing on the offending letter instead of destroying it” (Crusade, 104). Had Ferdinands simply destroyed the letter, Wells asserted, the controversy could have been avoided.

In a chapter titled “A Regrettable Interview,” Wells treats the controversy that disrupted her second trip to Europe. Because she continued to assail the indifference of the WCTU and other “Christian and moral influences” in the United States toward lynching, Wells became very unpopular with some of Frances Willard's English friends. When Wells reprinted an interview from the New York Voice in which Willard condoned lynching in the influential British magazine Fraternity, Lady Henry Somerset countered with a new interview with Willard intended to cast doubt on Wells and her mission. In this interview, Willard, for the first time, expressed a cautious stand against lynching.

Still showing her concern for setting the record straight, Wells documents this chapter with quotes from both the Somerset interview and her editorial response to it, which appeared the next day in the same publication, the Westminster Gazette. Wells's editorial represents a written equivalent of Harriet Brent Jacobs's “sass”:

Sir:

The interview published in your columns today hardly merits a reply, because of the indifference to suffering manifested. Two ladies are represented sitting under a tree at Reigate, and, after some preliminary remarks on the terrible subject of lynching, Miss Willard laughingly replies by cracking a joke. And the concluding sentence of her interview shows the object is not to determine best how they may help the Negro who is being hanged, shot and burned, but “to guard Miss Willard's reputation.”

With me, it is not myself nor my reputation, but the life of my people which is at stake, and I affirm that this is the first time to my knowledge that Miss Willard has said one single word in denouncing lynching or demand for law. The year 1890, the one in which her interview in The Voice appears, had a larger lynching record than in any previous year, and the number and territory of lynching have increased, to say nothing of the number of human beings burned alive.

Here Wells asserts her relation to the unifying symbol of her autobiography and her life, and to a personal myth of self that reflects the outraged mother defending the life of her people. This is accomplished through the “crusade” motif that provides the central metaphor for Wells's experience in the same way that “education” serves for Henry Adams. The extensive use of quotes in the chapter on Wells's experiences in England serve as part of the text's “historicizing paraphernalia.” The quotes authenticate both the text and the author's image of self, as they signal the historical intention in Wells's autobiographical impulse. Unfortunately, they also contribute to the eclectic quality and choppiness of form that characterize the text as a whole, especially the fourteen chapters on Wells's experiences as an antilynching lecturer abroad.

White newspapers in the United States, receiving marked copies of the articles from the British press, attempted to defame the crusader, providing another account to be settled. Wells's old enemy, the Memphis Daily Commercial, referred to her as a “Negro Adventuress.” Defending her autobiographical stance in the chapter “You Can't Change the Record,” Wells quotes an article from the June 13, 1894, Liverpool Daily Post that showed British reaction to the article published in the Memphis Daily Commercial: “If we were to convey an idea of the things said we should not only infringe upon the libel law, but have every reason to believe that we would do a gross and grotesque injustice.” In the “Ungentlemanly and Unchristian” chapter, Wells writes about how she met the editor of the St. Louis Republic while speaking against lynching in that city in 1894: “He remarked that he had been to great pains in sending persons throughout the south where I had lived in an effort to get something that he could publish against me. ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘you were over there giving us hail columbia, and if I could have found anything to your discredit I would have been free to use it on the ground that all is fair in war’” (Crusade, 234). The effect of these attacks, the autobiographer argues, was to increase public interest in her cause: “The Brooklyn Daily Eagle said it would pay Memphis to send for me and a salary to keep me silent; that as long as I was living in Memphis and publishing only a ‘one horse’ newspaper few people outside my district knew about me” (Crusade, 221).

“With help from her detractors,” writes the cultural historian Paula Giddings, “Wells' British tour was a personal triumph, and in the end had a great impact on the antilynching campaign. … English opinion had also broken the silence of many prominent American leaders. No longer could they afford to ignore ‘the talented schoolmarm,’ and such influential people as Richard Gilder, editor of Century magazine, Samuel Gompers, the labor leader, and yes, Frances Willard eventually lent their names in support of the campaign.”²⁸ In some sense, Wells seems to have understood and appreciated the dynamics of confrontation and identity formation as it functioned in her life and work, as well as the importance of choosing the proper time, public place, and issue for speaking out and assuming leadership. Never before had a black woman so publicly articulated the roots of the immediate oppression of her people or mounted an international campaign against the horror that oppression implied. Ironically, Wells's exile from Memphis gave her the opportunity to have an impact of greater magnitude. Yet this impact would be felt in Memphis as much as elsewhere. Giddings argues that the decrease in lynchings in 1893 and each year thereafter “can be directly attributed to the efforts of Ida B. Wells” and that “the effect of Wells' campaign was aptly demonstrated” in her “home city” of Memphis. “Memphis exported more cotton than any other city in the world, and Wells' assertions had been especially damaging to its image. So, as a direct result of her efforts, the city fathers were pressed to take an official stand against lynching—and for the next twenty years there was not another incident of vigilante violence there.”²⁹

After her first trip to England in 1893, Ida B. Wells returned to Chicago and a position on the Chicago Conservator. On June 27, 1895, she married Ferdinand L. Barnett, one of the founders of the Conservator. Wells's courtship coincides with a noticeable gap in her narrative; yet this is not surprising when one considers that Crusade for Justice is primarily a story of Wells's public life. She says only that Barnett proposed before she went to England the second time and that, when she returned, they married. Some of the details of their courtship are available from Alfreda Duster, who reports that her parents met “in the work.” After the death of his first wife, Barnett, the father of two small sons, was often asked if he would marry again: “He wasn't interested in just anybody, he was looking for a certain type of woman who would mean something to his life and career. And evidently Mama fit that pattern. He pursued and married her.”³⁰

When Wells “came back the second time, she went across the country, trying to organize anti-lynching leagues … and while she was touring the country, her itinerary was known and wherever she stopped there would be a letter from my father. And so they had a long distance correspondence courtship and I understand—I never saw one—but I understand my father could write a beautiful love letter.”³¹ According to her daughter, Wells was delighted to have found a man who believed in, and would agitate for, the same principles. At the time of their marriage, Wells began using the hyphenated surname Wells-Barnett. She was then thirty years old. “So far as her perception was concerned,” says Duster, “she was continuing her work. She was continuing in journalism because she took over the editorship of the Conservator within a week after they married. She wrote and she didn't want to lose the identity of Ida B. Wells.”³²

A perceptible change in Wells's autobiographical focus and the direction of her narrative occurs in the chapter entitled “A Divided Duty.” Thereafter, the text concentrates more on local affairs and on Wells's private life, the “rounding-out possibility” of the domestic sphere. Wells's treatment of the early years of her marriage explores the tension between the roles of public crusader and private woman—a theme introduced early in the autobiography and further developed in the written re-creation of her first speaking engagement in New York. Having returned from Europe and married Barnett, Wells purchased the Conservator from her husband “and others who owned it,” embarking on “A Divided Duty”: “I decided to continue my work as a journalist, for this was my first, and might be said, my only love” (Crusade, 242). Immediately following her marriage, Wells “took charge of the Conservator office.” “My duties as editor, as president of the Ida B. Wells Woman's Club, and speaker in many white women's clubs in and around Chicago kept me pretty busy. But I was not too busy to give birth to a male child the following 25 March 1896” (Crusade, 244-245).

Ida Wells-Barnett remained active. She named her firstborn Charles Aked Barnett, after the Reverend C. F. Aked of Liverpool, one of her English antilynching allies. Shortly after the child's birth, she undertook an antilynching speaking tour: “And so I started out with a six month old nursing baby and made trips to Decatur, Quincy, Springfield, Bloomington, and many other towns. I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever travelled with a nursing baby to make political speeches” (Crusade, 244). Perhaps one of the greatest moments of her life came at the founding meeting of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Present were Rosetta Sprague, daughter of Frederick Douglass, Ellen Craft, daughter and namesake of another famous slave narrator, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and “General” Harriet Tubman, the “Moses” who had led hundreds of fugitive slaves to freedom. Harriet Tubman, “the grand old woman” of the convention and the oldest member in attendance, “arrived to a standing ovation.” Charles Aked Barnett, the youngest in attendance, was named “Baby of the Association.” Thus, with the founding of the NACW, a symbolic torch was passed to a new generation, proclaiming both the emergence of “Black women into the forefront of the struggle for Black and women's rights” and the launching of “the modern civil rights movement.”³³

The latter portion of Crusade for Justice alternates between the activities of the political organizer and the life of hearth and home. The following anecdote symbolizes Wells's life of “divided duty” and demonstrates the complex practical problems facing a public figure who is also a mother:

When the time came for me to speak I rose and went forward. The baby, who was wide awake, looked around, and failing to see me but hearing my voice, raised his voice in angry protest. Almost unconsciously I turned to go to him, whereupon the chairman, who instantly realized the trouble, put someone else in the chair, went back to the back of the platform, and took the baby out into the hall where he could not hear my voice and kept him there until I had finished my task.

(Crusade, 245)

Ida Wells-Barnett soon discovers the demands of motherhood: “I found that motherhood was a profession by itself, just like schoolteaching and lecturing, and that once one is launched on such a career, she owed it to herself to become as expert as possible in the practice of her profession” (Crusade, 255). Even though she writes that she had not “entered into the bonds of holy matrimony with the same longing for children that so many other women have,” she believes that the creator has given woman “a wonderful place in the scheme of things” and revels in “having made this discovery” for herself. She writes that she is happy to have rejected birth-control information on her wedding night (Crusade, 241).

On the birth of her second son, Herman K. Barnett, in 1897, Wells-Barnett resigned the editorship of the Conservator and gave up the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Woman's Club in order to give full attention to raising her children. For the next fifteen years, motherhood was her primary occupation. Wells's autobiographical reticence about her private experiences in marriage reinforces the public nature of her narrative, as well as its authenticating structure. Apparently, many in the antilynching movement felt that Wells had “deserted the cause” by taking up her new “profession of motherhood.” In “Divided Duty,” Wells narrates an encounter with Susan B. Anthony:

She said, “I know of no one in all this country better fitted to do the work you had in hand than yourself. Since you have gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased. Besides, you have a divided duty. You are here trying to help in the formation of this league and your eleven-month-old baby needs your attention at home. You are distracted over the thought that maybe he is not being looked after as he would be if you were there, and that makes for a divided duty.”

Although it was a well-merited rebuke from her point of view, I could not tell Miss Anthony that it was because I had been unable, like herself, to get the support which was necessary to carry on my work that I had become discouraged in the effort to carry on alone.

(Crusade, 255)

So “carry on alone” becomes a central motif of the autobiography. When Wells married Barnett, she felt her own people censured her for having “abandoned the struggle.” From her point of view, “they were more outspoken because of the loss to the cause than they had been in holding up my hands when I was trying to carry a banner” (Crusade, 241). The passage cited above reflects a tone of conciliation affected by Wells's autobiographical persona from time to time. By telling the reader that some feminist leaders criticized her for diverting her energy away from her active public role into the private maternal sphere, and by registering her disappointment in not receiving more support from the black community for her crusade, Wells wins our sympathy for her difficult role of “carrying on alone.” Through the use of the earlier quotation attributed to Susan B. Anthony, Wells suggests that the overall success or failure of the antilynching campaign depended, at this time, largely on her individual effort. There is considerable validity to her claim. In the estimation of the historian August Meier, “Later on, after World War I, the NAACP entered upon the anti-lynching campaign, but at the turn of the century opposition to this vicious practice was essentially one and the same with the activities of Ida Wells-Barnett.”³⁴ Dedicated to both motherhood and activism, Wells refused to sacrifice either the public or the private role, but motherhood increased the enormity and complexity of her task.

In a later chapter, “Illinois Lynchings,” Wells relates her reluctance to continue the antilynching work after the birth of her children. In addition to the charge that she has “deserted the cause,” she also has been “accused by some of our men of jumping ahead of them and doing work without giving them a chance” (Crusade, 311). For these and other reasons, she writes, she has become less willing to do the hard and “thankless” work of investigating lynchings. But she did go, with the encouragement and blessing of her husband and family. Wells's “duty” absolves the “true woman” of the need to be politically quiescent:

I thought of that passage of Scripture which tells of wisdom from the mouth of babes and sucklings. I thought if my child wanted me to go I ought not to fall by the wayside. …

Next morning all four of my children accompanied my husband and me to the station and saw me start on the journey.

(Crusade, 311-312)

As a result of her efforts, Wells contends, the governor issued a statement that outlawed lynching in Illinois. And he refused to reinstate the Cairo sheriff who had cooperated with the mob that took the life of “Frog” James. Wells writes: “That was in 1909, and from that day until the present there has been no lynching in the state. Every sheriff, whenever there seem to be any signs of the kind, immediately telegraphs the governor for troops” (Crusade, 346). Of course, many lynchings went unreported. Despite the lack of a clear causal relationship between the actions of Wells-Barnett and those of the governor, her investigation did exercise a significant influence on public opinion.

In her role as wife and mother, Ida B. Wells fulfills the dream of Harriet Brent Jacobs—the dream of having a legitimate relationship with a man who will cherish and protect her. Ferdinand L. Barnett offered Wells this security, as well as a degree of financial independence and unlimited “moral” support for her mission. In the pages of her autobiography, Wells diminishes her personal importance to emphasize the importance of “the work,” the crusade of the outraged mother. On the other hand, she highlights the relationships she shared with her dependent children, for they help illustrate her life of “divided duty.” With the support of her dynamic mate, Wells-Barnett was able both to raise a family and to carry on her struggle against lynching. Barnett pushed her ahead, and in the folk idiom of Zora Neale Hurston, he propped her up on “every leanin' side.”

A look at the interview with Alfreda Duster on record at the Black Women's Oral History Project at Harvard University yields some of the personal information missing from the text. To the young Alfreda, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was “just mother,” a homemaker active in civic life. Duster remembers that her father did most of the cooking and that it was her job to have the potatoes cooked and ready for dinner when her father came home; she also remembers that her mother took an active part in the educational life of her children, often visiting teachers at school.³⁵ Like her own dear parents, Wells-Barnett stimulated in her children a love of reading and an appreciation for the importance of a good education. The archetypal outraged mother, Wells-Barnett was both protective and strict with her children. When her daughters were young, she established a rule that they must play in plain sight of the front door at all times. Discovered out of view in a friend's house, young Alfreda received a spanking.³⁶

Wells never grew quiescent. Despite the responsibilities of motherhood, she remained active in the struggle against lynching, the women's club movement, and the formation of the NAACP. Even when she had given up her work at the Conservator and the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club, she remained active in the city where she founded the Negro Fellowship League and the Alpha Suffrage Association. She was also a charter member of the National Negro Committee, a forerunner of the NAACP. In her work with the Alpha Suffrage Association in Chicago in 1914, Wells organized black women to canvass their neighborhoods and report their progress:

The women at first were very much disappointed.

They said that the men jeered at them and told them that they ought to be home taking care of the babies. Others insisted that the women were trying to take the place of men and wear the trousers. I urged each one of the workers to go back and tell the women that we wanted them to register so that they could help put a colored man in the city council.

(Crusade, 346)

Black men's reluctance to support female suffrage was understandable in the light of the racist attitudes of some white suffrage leaders and segregation within the suffrage movement. In fact, some southern white women hoped suffrage would offer “a means to the end of securing white supremacy.”³⁷ But Wells continued to attack racism within the movement as she organized the black community. In the end, her appeal to the black men of Chicago was successful.

Overall, Wells's work with the Alpha Suffrage Association would seem to indicate that black men who were reluctant to support women politically overcame that reluctance when presented with sound arguments about black women's suffrage. Many black men agreed with the analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois: “Votes for women means votes for Black women.” The consensus of masculine opinion, in the words of Paula Giddings, was that “political empowerment of the race required the participation of Black women.”³⁸ Thus Wells advanced the cause of the race through advancing the cause of black women and challenging publicly, at every opportunity, the racism of white suffragists. But always, even in this endeavor on behalf of women, the interests of the race came first.

If Du Bois was correct when he asserted that the Afro-American is a kind of seventh son gifted with double consciousness of himself as a black and an American, then Wells acquired a triple consciousness of herself—as an American, a black, and a woman. For Wells, existence was a phenomenon in which belief and action could not be separated. She believed, and therefore she acted, attaining an escape from the South that liberated her for an even greater potential. Her autobiography reflects a model of “antislavery” expression. Because lynching was one of the tools by which whites hoped to reduce blacks to their previous condition of servitude, antilynching agitation was truly antislavery agitation in the hearts and minds of its supporters. Despite the enormity of her task, Wells forged a legitimate black feminism through the synthesis of black nationalism and the suffrage movement, providing a useful model with race, not sex, as a point of departure. Her work established not only the ideological basis for later antilynching work by the NAACP but also for similar work done by the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a white group headed by the Texas feminist Jessie Daniel Ames. This Wells accomplished either because of, or in spite of, her racial and sexual identity.

In Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, the intelligence and sensibility of the narrator far exceed that of the unlettered slave. Here an aging author “confront[s] and connect[s] nineteenth and twentieth century experience” by placing herself at the center of a “repossessed past.”³⁹ Yet this twentieth-century autobiography possesses distinct formal attributes that help to identify its place in a tradition of black women writing autobiography. Wells's autobiographical consciousness alternates between the confession and the historical memoir, allowing the autobiographer the necessary latitude to discuss both her public and her private duty. This Wells required in order to demonstrate her development, not only as a political activist, but as a wife and mother. Throughout the autobiography, the concept of extended family reaches out to others in “the work.” In this way, Crusade for Justice, Wells's historical memoir, looks forward to the modern political autobiographies of Ann Moody, Shirley Chisholm, and Angela Davis. It represents an important link between the old and the new, part of the “lost ground” of Afro-American literary tradition.

Notes

1. John W. Blassingame, “Black Autobiographies as Histories and Literature,” Black Scholar 5, no. 4 (1973-1974): 7.

2. Albert E. Stone, The American Autobiography (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 2-3.

3. James Cox, “Recovering Literature's Lost Ground through Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 124-125.

4. See Patricia Meyers Spacks, “Stages of Self: Notes on Autobiography,” in Stone, American Autobiography, 44-45.

5. Alfreda M. Duster, Introduction, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), xiii-xiv.

6. Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 200.

7. See Estelle C. Jelinek, Introduction, Women's Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1-20.

8. Erik Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), 135.

9. Ibid., 125.

10. Alfreda M. Duster, letter to Joanne M. Braxton, January 30, 1983.

11. Ibid.

12. John Hope Franklin, Foreword, Crusade, x-xii.

13. Duster, Crusade, xiii. See also Norman B. Wood, The White Side of a Black Subject (Chicago: American Publishing House, 1897), 381-382.

14. Duster, Crusade, xiv.

15. Ibid., xxxi.

16. Ida B. Wells, Crusade, xiii-xiv. Hereafter cited in the text as Crusade, followed by page number.

17. Albert E. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 29.

18. Erikson, Life History, 161.

19. See Spacks, “Stages of Self,” 48.

20. Erikson, Life History, 141.

21. Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 26.

22. Erikson, Life History, 55.

23. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: Arno Press, 1969; originally published 1892), 2.

24. Ida B. Wells, letter to Frederick Douglass, October 17, 1892. Frederick Douglass Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

25. Frederick Douglass, letter to Ida B. Wells, October 25, 1892. Frederick Douglass Collection, Library of Congress.

26. Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 109.

27. Gertrude B. Mossell, The Work of the Afro-American Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; originally published 1894), 38.

28. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984), 92.

29. Ibid.

30. Interview conducted by Marcia Greenlee with Alfreda M. Duster on March 8-9, 1978, for the Black Women's Oral History Project at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Collection, Harvard University, 62. Quotes are used with the written permission of Alfreda Duster, August 6, 1981.

31. Ibid., 11.

32. Ibid., 16.

33. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 94.

34. August Meier, Introduction to On Lynchings, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett (New York: Arno Press, 1969), i.

35. Duster-Greenlee interview, 4.

36. Ibid.

37. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 126.

38. Ibid., 121.

39. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions, 29.