SOURCE: McMurry, Linda O. “Indictment of Lynching: ‘The cold-blooded savagery of white devils.’” In To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells, pp. 150-68. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, McMurry delineates Ida B. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching activism and career after the journalist's controversial departure from the Memphis Free Speech.]

“We cannot see what the ‘good’ citizens of Memphis gained by suppressing the Free Speech,” the St. Paul Appeal declared in August 1892. “They stopped the papers of a few hundreds subscribers and drove Miss Ida B. Wells to New York, and now she is telling the story to hundreds of thousands of readers.” Another black newspaper noted, “If those sneaking cowardly Negro hating Memphis copper-heads think they have gained anything by this arrangement they are welcome to it.”¹ Memphis whites probably had no idea that driving the Free Speech from their city would be so harmful to them. They did not quiet Wells or J. L. Fleming but instead gave them the moral authority of martyrdom. Wells was even honored by the school she had left in disgrace: Rust College awarded her an honorary Master of Arts degree soon after her exile.²

African American editors across the nation expressed outrage at the ousting of the Free Speech. The sentiments were well expressed by the Coffeyville, Kansas, Afro-American Advocate.

The fearless spirit of Ida Wells editor of the Memphis Free Speech [has been] spoken of in these columns and her bravery commended. Among all civilized people, courage commends itself to brave people but among the barbarians, of the Memphis stripe, her courage was a menace, so these brave, chivalrous southern people, made up their minds to drive this plucky little woman out of town.³

The editorial further noted the willingness of Memphis whites to assassinate both Fleming and Wells for “no other reason than the exercise of their rights of free speech.” It sarcastically concluded, “This is a very striking example of the superiority of the white race.”⁴

African Americans' anger was also fueled by the trials of the so-called Curve rioters soon after Wells and Fleming left Memphis. Editorials frequently linked the exile and the trials in their condemnations of the city. The Plaindealer proclaimed that “one outrage upon another has followed the Memphis massacre.” The Indianapolis Freeman listed five of the black defendants and reported their sentences, which ranged from fifteen years in the penitentiary to eleven months in the county workhouse. It then noted that none of the white lynchers had yet been found. Another column in the 17 June Plaindealer angrily related, “Judge DuBose thought the punishment too light and, after lecturing the jury, ordered them out of the courtroom.”⁵

Most black newspapers noted Wells's and Fleming's exiles and offered words of encouragement for their new endeavors. Although Wells received the most attention, Fleming was also praised for reestablishing the Free Speech in Chicago. The reborn paper was lauded by the Topeka Weekly Call, which declared, “The editorials, and general tone shows that the editor is equal to the task.” Nevertheless, Fleming was not able to sustain his Chicago paper. Wells later recalled that with “little money and no help he soon gave up and went West, connecting himself with a journal in Kansas.” After having been driven out of both Marion, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, Fleming was embittered. Wells regretfully noted, “To lose everything the second time when prospects were so bright was almost more than Mr. Fleming could bear. He blamed me very bitterly for that editorial, and perhaps he was justified in doing so.”⁶

Fleming's fate evoked brotherly concern from his fellow journalists; Wells's predicament moved her male cohorts to chivalric defense. Several offered her jobs—at least in the columns of their papers. In Kansas City the American Citizen declared, “If Miss Wells will accept our editorial chair it is at her disposal.” The Langston City Herald urged, “Come west, Miss Wells, come west.”⁷ The chorus of praise for her courage seemed overly effusive to some editors—especially those who had been at odds with Wells earlier. In July 1892 the Indianapolis Freeman noted her affiliation with Fortune at the New York Age and launched into a diatribe against all the attention given Wells. It followed the quote “Crown her with flowers/And sprinkle her with perfume” with “Until you carry it ad nauseum.” The editorial also implored, “we must ask, gentlemen of the press, with no desire to repress your fraternal gallantry, that you do not take the bit into your eloquent mouths and ride this free horse of manly privilege to death.”⁸

Although the Freeman acknowledged that “Miss Wells is a good writer, an earnest, industrious lady, who has been inconvenienced, made to suffer, and is an exile from home because of devotion to her wronged and persecuted people,” the tone of the editorial infuriated other male journalists. Responding to attacks in August for not sufficiently praising her, the Freeman remarked on the “implication that Miss Wells is a fisher of compliments and praise from any source” and expressed hope it was mistaken. “We can conceive of women,” the editorial continued, “yes, and of men too by the score, bewiskered, stentorian voiced barnacles of the press, who might cry their eyes out for compliments that never came, … but, of this somewhat unfortunate young woman, we had no thought of such a thing.” The Freeman urged Wells not to “allow the impression to obtain that she is a poser for attention.”⁹

A few other papers echoed the Freeman's charges. The American Citizen noted the same month that the Boston Courant “has at last found out Ida Wells [is a] fake” and commented, “Brother you are right. She seeks fame and gets notoriety.”¹⁰ Such criticisms led to further chivalric defenses by male editors. The Langston City Herald warned:

The Freeman of Indianapolis and the Boston Courant will “get it in the neck” if they don't let up on Miss Ida B. Wells, of the New York Age. It is true that she is small in stature, but she is diamond pointed and a fighter “from the ground up,” and the Herald stands ready to hold her bonnet whenever she sails into you cultured gentlemen.¹¹

Even her critics realized her strength. One reason the Freeman admonished her defenders was because she did not need such help. It noted that “we have no thought, but that any half dozen of you, with all your mental brilliancy would fall an easy ‘take’ to her trenchant ‘gray goose quill.’”¹²

Seldom was Wells not embroiled in some controversy. Even after leaving Memphis, she continued to upset the city. Her exile and the conviction of the “Curve rioters” rekindled the anger of the black community. Fearing further violence, a few black Memphians sought to douse the flames of passion with calm words. One was the Reverend B. A. Imes of the Second Congregational Church, who as an activist preacher and leader had won Wells's respect. In 1887 he had told Memphis whites, “A church which makes caste distinctions in ecclesiastical relations, or in the worship of God, thereby forfeits its right to be called a church of Jesus in Christ.” After the lynchings, Imes had flirted with emigration and visited Oklahoma. He decided instead to stay in Memphis and play the role of peacemaker. In the week after the demise of the Free Speech, Imes wrote a letter to the editor of the Langston City Herald deploring “rash mutterings of violence” on the part of “certain ones who speak for the negro.”¹³

Imes proposed a meeting between the white and black leaders of Memphis in June to discuss ways to restore harmony to the city's race relations. On 7 June a biracial group of more than sixty met at the Cotton Exchange. Imes addressed the group and criticized whites for blaming all Negroes for the actions of a few. He also declared that most black Memphians deplored the Free Speech editorial. While implying that black rapists were rare, Imes said African Americans denounced rape and called on white leaders to take a similar stand against lynching. “We cannot believe,” he stated, “that any intelligent businessman, merchant, lawyer—any good citizen can honestly advocate lynching as a substitute for the legal process of dealing with crime.”¹⁴

Imes won white support, and a few days later a biracial committee drew up a set of resolutions. As a member of the committee, Imes conceded much to win white condemnation of lynching. The statement recognized whites as the “dominant and ruling element” with the responsibility “to give adequate protection from outrage and wrong to the weaker and more helpless element, composed of colored people, whose former services and devotion to them through a trying ordeal, appeal so strongly for sympathy and kindness.”¹⁵ Peace was bought with the coin of paternalism.

Peacemaking became more difficult when Wells refused to be silenced. Using the front pages of the New York Age in late June, she described events in Memphis and discussed lynching in general. Previous subscribers to the Free Speech in Memphis all received copies. Thus the city's whites learned of Wells's role as author of the infamous editorial in the last edition of the Free Speech. Their rage escalated as she repeated her attack on the reputations of white women for a national audience. The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche explained that whites had mistakenly believed Fleming to be the author of the “scurrilous reflection upon the white ladies of the South.” It then noted Wells's connection with the Age and charged “she has continued to publish matter not a whit less scandalous than that which aroused the ire of the whites just prior to her departure.”¹⁶

Imes once again sought to calm the waters. He met with about a dozen black leaders in a private home to organize an “indignation meeting of all the colored people in the city.” Even before the public meeting, Imes and two others drafted a response to Wells's articles for publication in the Appeal-Avalanche. While granting “the right of personal views as to the matter and manner of public discussion,” the statement called for appeals to “reason and intelligence rather than to passion and prejudice.” Claiming to be speaking for the “large portion of our people who are capable of exercising a sober judgment and foresight,” the document proclaimed

we desire to put on record a most positive disapproval of the course pursued by Miss Ida Wells, through the medium of the New York Age, in stirring up from week to week, in this community and wherever that paper goes, the spirit of strife over the unhappy question at issue. We see no good to come from this method of journalism on either side. … Virtue cannot be encouraged by sowing scandal broadcast, polluting the minds of the innocent and pure.¹⁷

The charge of “polluting the minds of the innocent and pure” would be leveled in various ways at Wells and her discussions of sexual relationships and rape. Such topics did not seem appropriate for womanly discussion.

Publication of the resolutions brought criticism from Wells and other black journalists. In response, Imes and B. K. Sampson wrote letters to black newspapers to explain their actions. The Detroit Plaindealer acknowledged Imes's and Sampson's actions were taken in good faith and that their past record entitled the men to a fair-minded hearing. At the same time the Plaindealer asked “why should representative Afro-Americans cringe and coddle” and declared, “It is time the Afro-American ceased to stand before the world as a coward. It is more honorable, and it would be better for the race for a few to die honorably than to cringe before the unholy promises that are not intended to be kept.”¹⁸

Even those words were mild, however, compared to the lambaste leveled by Wells. Her attacks were so brutal that they provoked a backlash of sympathy for Imes and Sampson from other black journalists, including the editor of the Plaindealer. After granting “due deference” to Wells, he noted that “it hardly seems fair, that standing as a refugee” Wells should criticize those who dared to stay “in a bloody city while looking along the barrel of a ready Winchester.”¹⁹

The question of whether it is better to flee and denounce injustice or to stay and fight it was raised by others. One of the more ironic exchanges on the issue occurred when J. C. Duke of the Pine Bluff Weekly Echo criticized Fleming's editorial in the Chicago Free Speech. Fleming had noted that lynching in the South “will not be stopped with outside violent influence” but by people living in the region. Duke retorted that lynching would end only after all potential victims had been run out or “those less fleet of foot than Editor Fleming have been caught and killed.” Duke's assertion that Fleming “should have staid [sic] in Memphis and assisted in settling that problem,” was met with derision by W. Calvin Chase of the Washington Bee. Chase recalled that Duke had been driven from Montgomery for writing an editorial very similar to that of Wells and ridiculed him for demanding of Fleming what he was unwilling to do himself.²⁰

Black journalists were often hard on one another and seemed to consider the exchange of barbs a natural part of their profession. Wells was very good at hurling insults, but not as good at accepting criticism. She reacted angrily to the Plaindealer's mild rebuke and charged the paper with being an apologist for Sampson and Imes. In response the Plaindealer accused Wells of misrepresenting what had been written and denied the paper had ever “sanctioned the current idea of temporizing with wrong.” It also questioned the heroism of flight.

The Plaindealer declared it was unfair for [Wells] to pose as a hero, while running as against others who for the sake of their families have pursued another course and staid. Neither party has accomplished anything so far and there has been no act that would stamp one as a hero and the other a coward.²¹

Although her words were forceful, some black journalists criticized Wells's use of caustic comments to make her points. The American Citizen claimed it could be published in Memphis with “no fear of being killed.” The paper charged that Wells was at least partly responsible for her fate of exile and claimed the following:

The method is the trouble. Some medicine will not stay in the stomach when taken. Small doses, sugar-coated, would do better. God could have made the world and all in it in one minute. He chose to take six days, in order, if for nothing else, to teach the Negro patience, moderation and conservatism.²²

It was not the first, nor the last, time Wells would be rebuked for her militancy. Nevertheless, she felt she could do no less.

Her forced exile did not cow Ida Wells but instead added more fuel to her rage and strength to her determination. “Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life and been made an exile,” she wrote, “I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.”²³ She was grateful to T. Thomas Fortune and his co-owner of the New York Age, Jerome B. Peterson, for giving her a base of operations in her war against lynching. In return for the subscription list of the Free Speech, the two men gave Wells a one-fourth interest in their paper and paid her a salary for writing weekly articles on the “southern field.”²⁴

While she had peppered the Free Speech with antilynching articles and editorials, Wells focused and refined her arguments on lynching in the Age. She began with a description of the events of 24 May that had caused the demise of her newspaper. Wells not only reprinted her editorial but also those of the Memphis Daily Commercial and Evening Scimitar that led to the meeting at the Cotton Exchange at which “threats of lynching were freely indulged.” The Scimitar's threats to “brand [the editor] in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor's shears” were thus given a national audience.²⁵ Allowing the words of whites to damn themselves was an effective method of exposing racism and became a frequent tool of Wells.

In her attempt to reeducate America about lynching, Wells attacked the idea that lynching was the work of poor, ignorant whites whose actions were deplored by their “betters.” Writing of the lynching threats at the Cotton Exchange on 24 May, Wells noted the actions were “not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—but by the leading business men, in the leading business center.”²⁶ As long as those who actually had the power to stop lynching were exonerated from the responsibility for it, very little improvement would result. Wells would not allow elite whites to reap the benefits of black subordination while washing their hands of the unseemly methods by which it was enforced.

Next, Wells directly confronted the issue of rape and its relation to lynching. Using the arguments of lynching apologists that black rape of white women was not a problem before emancipation, she reinterpreted the meaning of that claim. One reason for the persistence of that myth was its usefulness to both sides of the lynching debate. Whites used it to explain why lynching had only just begun for a crime that they claimed was inherent in bestiality of Negroes. To them the recent emergence of rape as an issue reflected the rise of a generation of African Americans who had never known the restraining hand of slavery. Wells attacked their logic, exclaiming:

The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.²⁷

Wells asserted, “I feel that the race and the public generally should have a statement of the facts as they exist.” She often proclaimed her allegiance to the “facts” and argued a factual accounting would “serve at the same time as a defense for the Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.”²⁸

Whereas the Free Speech editorial had been subtle by hinting obliquely at the theme of voluntary sexual liaisons between white women and black men, Wells now became explicit. She told how J. C. Duke had voiced his suspicions of “the growing appreciation of white Juliets for colored Romeos” and was forced to leave Montgomery for “reflecting on the ‘honah’ of white women.” Before leaving town, Duke had disclaimed any intention of “slandering Southern white women.” Wells, on the other hand, boldly announced she would make no such disclaimer and instead asserted that “there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law.”²⁹

Wells also attacked the irrationality of southern miscegenation laws that supposedly outlawed interracial sex. Such laws, she noted, were enforced only against “the legitimate union of the races.” The laws did not prevent a white man from seducing “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.” The black man, Wells claimed, was lynched “not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.” Her point was obvious. Protection of female purity might be honorable, but jealousy was not.³⁰

To explain how consent was transformed into rape by white women, Wells related the story of the white Ohio woman who told her minister husband that while he was out of town working for the Prohibitionist party, she had been brutally attacked by a black man. She claimed the man had forced himself into the kitchen, chloroformed her, and raped her. The accused man was sent to prison, even though he vehemently denied raping the woman. Four years later the wife, overcome with remorse, admitted she had lied. Acknowledging that the accused rapist “had a strange fascination for me” and that he had visited several times “and each time I was indiscreet,” the wife explained her lies to her husband: “I had several reasons for telling you. One was the neighbors saw the fellow here, another was, I was afraid I had contracted a loathsome disease, and still another was that I feared I might give birth to a Negro baby. I hoped to save my reputation by telling you a deliberate lie.”³¹ In recounting the story, Wells related names, dates, and places to give the account a quality of legitimacy—another tactic she frequently employed.

Wells also realized that a single story would not make her contentions credible. “A few instances to substantiate the assertion that some white women love the company of the Afro-American,” she wrote, “will not be out of place.” To convince the doubters, Wells assured her readers that most of the cases, she would give “were reported by the daily papers of the South.” She realized that gleaning her examples from white sources would make them hard for white southerners to deny. Drawing from Memphis papers, Wells recounted six cases in that city where white women had voluntarily taken black lovers or black men had been proven to be innocent of rapes charged to them.³²

To prove Memphis was not an aberration, Wells then recounted similar incidents from all around the South. In a rapid, staccato style she listed case after case, pausing occasionally to give the details of specific cases. The women involved represented a broad stratum of society—from prostitute to physician's wife. In a number of cases, women gave birth to dark babies but refused to name the father. Wells asserted that hundreds of other examples could be given and that there “is hardly a town in the South which has not had an instance of the kind which is well-known.” Thus, she contended, her assertion that “nobody in the South believes the old thread bare lie that negro men rape white women” was not slander but reality.³³

Very aware of most people's aversion to the crime of rape, Wells sought to divorce the actions of lynch mobs from the punishment of rape. One way she did this was by showing that white men “are not so desirous of punishing rapists as they pretend.” To expose their hypocrisy, Wells noted how “the pulpits, officials and newspapers of the South” had become apologists for the lynchings of black rapists of white women, but “when the victim is a colored woman it is different.” Following her previous method, Wells reported case after case where white rapists had attacked black women and girls without paying any serious consequences for their action. Some were acquitted despite evidence of their guilt. Others received short sentences—one served six months and was made a police detective for the city of Nashville after his release. In one case rumors of a black mob preparing to lynch a white rapist led to the posting of 250 white guards armed with Winchester rifles.³⁴

Wells could be very graphic in her descriptions of lynchings. One case that especially enraged her was the lynching of Eph. Grizzard. He was accused of rape and brutally lynched in Nashville, Tennessee. Wells captured the horror of the event with forceful imagery of the events following his removal from jail by a white mob:

… with Governor Buchanan and the police and militia standing by, [Grizzard was] dragged through the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step, and with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise, he was at last swung out on the bridge with hands cut to pieces as he tried to climb up the stanchions.

The barbarity of the lynching itself was horrifying, but Wells was further disturbed by another circumstance of the event. When taking Grizzard from the jail, the mob had left in his cell, unmolested, a white man who had raped an eight-year-old girl. “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black,” Wells wrote.³⁵

After eliminating rape as the real reason for lynching, Wells then explained the roots of the practice. To her the evil resulted from “the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race.” Whites had opposed blacks' voting and holding office, and the Ku Klux Klan and others had used violence to prevent or limit both. Wells noted that these “massacres were excused as the natural resentment of intelligence against government by ignorance.” Some African Americans had believed political rights should be sacrificed for peace. They felt their race “should fit itself for government, and when that should be done, the objection to race participation in politics would be removed.” Wells sadly reported, “But the sacrifice did not remove the trouble, nor move the South to justice.” She then directly attacked the notion that white discrimination was the result of black backwardness by discussing the segregation of trains. “The race regardless of advancement,” she wrote, “is penned into filthy, stifling partitions cut off from smoking cars.”³⁶

Disfranchisement negated a political justification for lynching. At that point, Wells asserted, the South needed a “new cry” and adroitly began “shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women.” The effect of the new cry was described by Wells: “It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this ‘land of liberty.’” She denounced the silence of leaders as much as the violence of mobs. “They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.”³⁷

Wells frequently noted that both the press and the pulpit not merely acquiesced but also sometimes abetted mob action by spreading the foul lies used to justify it. Again she used whites' own words to prove her point. Wells reproduced long quotes from two Memphis newspapers that appeared following the triple lynchings in that city. Both reiterated the rape myth. The Commercial regretted that even lynching did not adequately deter black rapists: “The facts of the crime appear to appeal more to the Negro's lustful imagination than the facts of the punishment do to his fears. He sets aside all fear of death in any form when opportunity is found for the gratification of his bestial desires.” The Evening Scimitar came closer to the truth, but still found it necessary to include some allusion to rape. “Aside from the violation of white women by Negroes, which is the outcropping of a bestial perversion of instinct,” it declared, “the chief cause of trouble between the races in the South is the Negro's lack of manners.” Acts of independence on the part of African Americans were labeled “boorish insolence.” Blaming the Memphis riot of 1866 on “the outrageous conduct of blacks towards whites on the streets,” the Scimitar then revealed the true nature of its complaints.

It is also a remarkable and discouraging fact that the majority of such scoundrels are Negroes who have received educational advantages at the hands of the white taxpayers. They have got just enough learning to make them realize how hopelessly their race is behind the other in everything that makes a great people, and they attempt to “get even” by insolence, which is ever the resentment of inferiors.³⁸

To Wells the paper inadvertently revealed the true cause of lynching—white fear and resentment of black advancement.

At this point Wells introduced the story of the lynchings of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart to illustrate white reaction to black advancement and to dispel the notion that lynching victims were poor, ignorant criminals or political radicals. She called the Memphis victims “three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood” and described them as “peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic businessmen.” Painting them as conservatives, Wells noted, “They believed the [race] problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the purse.” In retrospect, their murder undoubtedly played a major role in Wells's later rejection of the accommodationist approach of Booker T. Washington, who counseled African Americans to put their energy toward economic and educational advancement rather than political agitation.³⁹

After a brief account of the events in Memphis, Wells asked the rhetorical question: What lesson did whites seek to give by the lynchings? Her answer was “the lesson of subordination.” She believed the whites were saying to themselves, “Kill the leaders and it will cow the Negro who dares to shoot a white man, even in self-defense.” Wells also pointed out that the white papers misrepresented facts to make lynchings seem more justifiable. She told of an incident in which the lynching victim was reported to have raped the eight-year-old daughter of the sheriff. In fact the woman was eighteen and had been discovered by her father in the black man's room. Wells repeatedly attacked the credibility of the news sources from which most Americans learned of lynchings—an important step in the reeducation of the nation.⁴⁰

In her lynching articles, Wells next debunked the notion of a “New South.” Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution and others had been touting the remaking of the region from the “Cotton Kingdom” into a land of opportunity for business investors. Seeking an infusion of northern capital, New South advocates sang the praises of the region's plentiful resources, cheap labor, and industrial potential. Out of the ashes of defeat, the South was said to be rising with a new vigor and outlook. In what Wells called “well-mannered speeches in New England and New York,” Grady asserted the South's ability to solve its racial problems if freed from the meddling of northerners who did not understand the situation. Distracted by other issues and priorities, northerners increasingly accepted the idea of a “redeemed” South, which no longer required federal intervention. Wells sought to destroy that fabrication. “There is little difference,” she proclaimed, “between the Ante-bellum South and the New South.” She explained:

Her white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood of the race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of his civil rights or redress therefor in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him.

The result, Wells claimed, was that the “South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled [sic].”⁴¹

If whites wondered what they could do about the scourge of lynching, Wells provided some examples. She named groups and people who had taken forceful stands against “the frequent and revolting crimes against a weak people.” Recipients of her praise included “the spirit of Christianity of the great M. E. Church,” which led to the adoption of “strong condemnatory resolutions at its General Conference in Omaha last May.” The Republican party received fainter praise for its “feeble declaration of the belief in human rights in the Republican platform at Minneapolis, June 7th.” Wells also lauded President Benjamin Harrison, the governor and the chief justice of Georgia, and the citizens of Chattanooga for opposing or preventing lynching.

In her discussion of white opposition to lynching, Wells printed a long quote from Col. A. S. Colyar of Nashville, Tennessee. As a well-known “New South” advocate, Colyar's condemnation and descriptions of lynchings increased the credibility of her own accounts. His words were no less forceful: “Nothing since I have been a reading man has so impressed me with the decay of manhood among the people of Tennessee as the dastardly submission to mob rule.” The actions of mobs, he believed, reflected “a degeneracy rapidly approaching savage life.” Wells asserted the need for such strong, public stands against lynching. “The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon the lynchers in severe punishment,” she argued, “but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public sentiment demands and sustains such action.”⁴²

Wells concluded her treatise on lynching with a message to African Americans regarding the weapons available to them in the battle against lynching. She stressed their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Trying to get them to realize their power, she explained:

To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.⁴³

To prove the existence of that power and to demonstrate its effectiveness, Wells recounted events in Memphis and in Kentucky.

Following the triple lynching in Memphis, Wells noted, African Americans had remained peaceful and “waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice.” When this did not happen, they “left the city by thousands, bringing about great stagnation in every branch of business.” Those who remained boycotted the streetcars in protest. As a result of the economic impact of these actions, whites held a meeting and passed resolutions condemning lynching. Persistence was required, however, because whites still refused to punish the lynchers. That failure caused Memphis to continue “losing her black population.”⁴⁴

In Kentucky, Wells claimed, a boycott of newly segregated railroad cars would cost the various railroads a million dollars in that one year. She encouraged such activities, claiming “the appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.” Rejecting an accommodationist approach, she proclaimed, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be gained by further sacrifice of manhood and self-respect.” Indeed, lynchings had been prevented by armed self-defense in Jacksonville, Florida, and Paducah, Kentucky. “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” Wells declared. “The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.”⁴⁵ These were powerful words, but they demanded unrealistic resistance from a race in a region where all the powers of the state were arrayed against it.

Wells also issued a challenge to her fellow journalists to become investigative reporters and expose the falsified accounts of particular lynchings. Asserting that “there is no educator to compare with the press,” Wells cited examples of how white coverage of lynchings from New York to Alabama had been proved biased and inaccurate by thorough investigation. “The race thus outraged,” she exhorted, “must find out the facts of this awful hurling of men into eternity on supposition, and give them to the indifferent and apathetic country.” Wells then concluded her treatise on lynching with the following challenge:

Nothing is more definitely settled than [the Afro-American] must act for himself. I have shown how he may employ the boycott, emigration and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery. “The gods help those who help themselves.”⁴⁶

The reference to barbarism is indicative of a recurring theme in the writing of Wells—and indeed of most apostles of antilynching in the late nineteenth century. A resurgence of colonialism by Europe and the United States was accompanied by increasing attention on the concepts of “civilization” and “barbarism.” This interest was also compounded by the popularization of the Darwinian concepts of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and evolution. By applying those principles to humankind, peoples of European descent justified their positions of power. Human society was said to have evolved from a primitive, savage state of barbarism to a refined, cultured state of civilization. Some people believed that the advanced evolution of Europeans was rooted in genetics, and, therefore relatively permanent. To others the non-European peoples of the world merely lagged behind and would eventually follow the stages of development on the road to civilization that Europeans had already passed. Either way, for the present, most Europeans and European Americans agreed that “backward peoples” required the guiding hand of their “superiors.” By emphasizing a sharp dichotomy between their own “civilized” natures and the “barbarity” of the rest of humankind, they justified imposing their government and economic control on others, calling it the “White Man's Burden.”

At the same time, late-nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization required a new degree of self-restraint and discipline. Businessmen became more dependent on access to capital for investment, so that strict control of one's expenditures was often a necessary first step up the ladder of success. As businesses grew larger so did responsibilities. Personal restraint, organization, and discipline were necessary in order to coordinate the activities of numerous employees. For the workers, factories brought new demands that curtailed spontaneity and required more self-discipline, bodily urges had to be sublimated to the time clock. Instead of personal whim or instinctual responses, the clock now told one when to rise, when to work, when to eat, and even when to go to the bathroom at work. These demands caused a reinterpretation of manhood. Physical strength, courage, aggressiveness, and strong will had defined masculine ideals in earlier frontier conditions, but now success depended on restraint and discipline. True manhood was redefined as responsibility, refinement, and restraint.

Concepts of manhood and civilization became closely linked. Manliness was also considered the result of the evolution from the primitive savagery of barbarism to the cultured refinement of civilization. Because civilization brought with it the right to rule others, political power was an element of true manhood. Lynching apologists argued that Negroes were a less evolved people still mired in animal-like savagery. Controlled by their lust rather than their intellect, bestial black men naturally lacked the self-restraint to wait for consent before sexual conquests. Such men surely could not be given the responsibility of voting. How could they govern others, when they could not even govern their own instincts? Was not any measure, no matter how extreme, justified in restraining assaults on white civilization by black barbarism? Because white women were the pure embodiment of that civilization, could there ever be greater barbarism that the defilement of that purity by the bestial act of rape? Such questions quieted protests to mob law.

In the battle for white support against lynching, Wells and others recognized that attacks on civilization and manhood would not win converts. They were too essential to whites' self-definition. Instead the principles of both manhood and civilization would have to be reaffirmed and redefined by antilynching advocates. Mob law had to be shown as the result of barbarism rather than the remedy for it.⁴⁷

Although Wells was not the only one to use the issues of civilization and manhood to denounce lynching, she was perhaps the most effective. She accomplished this in number of ways. First, she exposed the mythical nature of the cry of rape, stripping away the most compelling “honorable” justification of lynching. Second, she questioned the manliness of those who would basely exploit true manhood's desire to protect womanhood to justify a barbaric practice. Third, she described lynching as a savage act of uncontrolled fury or as a throwback to outdated notions of manliness. Fourth, she contrasted the restraint shown by African Americans with the excesses of lynch mobs. Fifth, she warned of the destructive force of mob law on civilization and democracy. In short, Wells was able to cast lynchers as crude barbarians rather than as manly defenders of womanhood. As she later wrote, “No torture of helpless victims by heathen savages or cruel red Indians ever exceeded the cold-blooded savagery of white devils under lynch law.”⁴⁸

Wells later recalled that Fortune and Peterson had printed ten thousand of the first edition of the New York Age that contained her words on lynching. She indicated that a “thousand copies were sold in the streets of Memphis alone.”⁴⁹ Clearly, the city's citizens had not quieted Wells. Numerous people remarked on how her audience had expanded.

In a book on African American women published the next year, Monroe Majors declared:

Her readers remain the same, only the magnetic force of her pen enjoys a broader scope. Before her audience was a multitude. Now it is the nation. Ten thousand minds fly out to her in adoration and praise. Ten thousand hearts throb with exaltation in witnessing her triumphs.

The prophecy of the Detroit Plaindealer was realized when Wells was given a safer place than Memphis from which to speak. “The bourbons of Memphis, smarting under the … strictures of the Free Speech regarding lawlessness,” the paper noted, “drove its editors from their homes by cowardly threats, but the New York Age which is yet more caustic will take its place.”⁵⁰

Ironically, if Wells had not been run out of Memphis, she would never have become the recognized leader of the antilynching movement—and thus Memphis and its lynchings would have likely been soon forgotten as new, bloodier massacres occurred across the South. Three months before Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were lynched, Edward Coy had been lynched in Texarkana. In its immediate aftermath that lynching received as much, or possibly more, attention as the one in Memphis. Coy was burned alive after being falsely accused of rape by a white woman who had willingly been intimate with him for months. It was an ideal case with which to prove the falsity of many rape charges.

Indeed, in an antilynching meeting held at New York City in April 1892, speakers gave more attention to the Texarkana lynching than to those in Memphis—or Ida B. Wells. Still a resident of Memphis, Wells was only one of many to occupy the platform while T. Thomas Fortune and others spoke. The Coy lynching also provoked a series of articles under the heading “Is God Dead?” in the Kansas City American Citizen written by its editor, C. H. J. Taylor. He appears to have believed he should have become the foremost antilynching advocate, which helps explain his comment about Wells, “She seeks fame and gets notoriety.” Taylor was jealous not only of the attention Wells received after her exile but also of Frederick Douglass, who almost eclipsed both Taylor and Wells in the fight against lynching.⁵¹

Douglass had given militant speeches against lynching even prior to Wells's exile from Memphis. Immediately after her first antilynching article in the New York Age, he published “Lynch Law in the South” in the July issue of the North American Review. His article made many of the same points as Wells and Taylor had, but it received more attention because of both his international renown and the wider circulation of the North American Review. His own white wife provided tangible proof that white women could desire black men. Even in Memphis, Douglass's article provoked more rage than Wells's articles. The Evening Scimitar called the famous black abolitionist a “senile negro scoundrel” and labeled his article “the vilest assault on millions of his country['s] women that a black heart could conceive or a lying pen frame in words.”⁵²

Within two years, however, Ida B. Wells would be the best-known figure in the antilynching movement. A meeting called on her behalf in October 1892 by black women in New York launched Wells's speaking career. Her elocution lessons and drama experiences in Memphis helped her to give speeches with unusual force and power. Perhaps the fact she was a women discussing sexual matters in public added to her mystique. At any rate, demands for her lectures mushroomed and eventually sprouted across the Atlantic as well.

Notes

1. St. Paul Appeal, 10 August 1892; Detroit Plaindealer, 15 July 1892.

2. L. A. Scruggs, Women of Distinction (Raleigh, NC: L. A. Scruggs Publisher, 1893), p. 38; Indianapolis Freeman, 27 April 1895.

3. (Coffeyville, Kansas) Afro-American Advocate, 17 June 1892.

4. Ibid.

5. Detroit Plaindealer, 17 June 1892; Indianapolis Freeman, 30 July 1892.

6. Topeka Weekly Call, 25 July 1892; Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice, The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 67.

7. (Kansas City) American Citizen, 3 June 1892; Langston City Herald, 4 June 1892.

8. Indianapolis Freeman, 16 July 1892.

9. Ibid., 20 August 1892.

10. American Citizen, 12 August 1892.

11. Langston City Herald, 3 September 1892.

12. Indianapolis Freeman, 16 July 1892.

13. David M. Tucker, Black Pastors and Leaders: Memphis, 1819-1972 (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1975), pp. 41-42; Langston City Herald, 28 May 1892.

14. Memphis Appeal-Avalanche, 8 June 1892.

15. Ibid., 12 June 1892.

16. Ibid., 30 June 1892.

17. Ibid.

18. Detroit Plaindealer, 29 July 1892.

19. Ibid., 5 August 1892.

20. Washington Bee, 14 July 1894.

21. Detroit Plaindealer, 19 August 1892.

22. American Citizen, 3 June 1892.

23. Duster, Crusade, p. 69.

24. Ibid., p. 63.

25. Wells's articles from the New York Age were republished in a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which has been reprinted (with other of her pamphlets) by Oxford University Press. As that printing is more widely available than microfilm of the Age, it will serve as the source cited in this discussion of the articles. Trudier Harris, comp., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 16-18.

26. Wells, Southern Horrors, p. 18.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 19.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

32. Wells had long noted such cases; in 1891 she wrote of “a clear case of love of a pretty white woman for a ‘black, kinky headed Negro.’” American Citizen, 9 October 1891.

33. Wells, Southern Horrors, pp. 23-26.

34. Ibid., pp. 26-28.

35. Ibid., p. 27.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., pp. 28-30.

38. Ibid., pp. 31-34.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., pp. 34-36.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., pp. 37-39. Colyar's comments were reprinted in several black newspapers; for example, see the Huntsville Weekly Gazette, 6 August 1892.

43. Wells, Southern Horrors, p. 40.

44. Ibid., p. 41.

45. Ibid., pp. 42.

46. Ibid., pp. 43-45.

47. For further discussion of the issues of manhood and civilization see, Gail Bederman, “‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign (1892-94),” Radical History Review 52 (1992), pp. 4-30; Hazel V. Carby, “‘On the Threshold of the Woman's Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), pp. 262-277; J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); Norman Vance, The Sinews of Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

48. Duster, Crusade, p. 70.

49. Duster, Crusade, p. 71.

50. Monroe A. Majors, Noted Negro Women, Their Triumphs and Activities (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1893), p. 190; Detroit Plaindealer, 24 June 1892.

51. American Citizen, 12 August 1892; New York Times, 5 April 1892; American Citizen, 19, 26 February, 4 March 1892. Taylor called an antilynching article by Douglass “a rehash, in substance clothed in different words of our article which appeared [a] month ago under the Caption ‘Is God Dead?’” in the 29 July issue of the American Citizen. The New York meeting also raises an interesting conflict in sources. In her autobiography (p. 58) Wells claimed her trip to New York at the time of her exile was her first one to the East. She did not even mention the April meeting in her book. Perhaps she desired to emphasize her role as the originator of the antilynching movement. At the time she wrote her memoirs, she was bitter over the failure of African Americans to acknowledge her contributions and thus maybe downplayed the roles of others both in her mind and her writings.

52. Clipping from the Memphis Evening Scimitar, n.d., in Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress; Huntsville Weekly Gazette, 21 May 1892; (Coffeyville, Kansas) Afro-American Advocate, 3 June 1892; Frederick Douglass, “Lynch Law in the South,” North American Review, 155 (July 1892), pp. 17-24. For examples of the attention paid the article in the black press see the Atchison Blade, 3 March 1893 and the Indianapolis Freeman, 9 July 1892.