In her powerful anti-lynching pamphlets of the 1890s, Black activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) taught her contemporaries how to read politically. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 each present a savvy, ultimately challenging manipulation and exposé of the dominant ideologies enmeshing then-contemporary race, class, and gender issues. Throughout, Wells-Barnett instructs her readers about the shaping power of printed words, both her own and those of her opponents in the Southern press. Collaging a great patchwork of quotations from both the white and the African-American press, she allows the dialogic dynamics of the resulting text to teach the reader how context can modify meaning. Typically, she follows these quoted passages with sophisticated analyses of their rhetorical devices.

Not only in her rhetorical analysis, but also in her own prose, Wells-Barnett pressures the ideological constructs that naturalized racism for turn-of-the-century white Americans. As I will outline, in these pamphlets Wells-Barnett often employs highly conventional binary oppositions (i.e., civilized versus savage, law and order versus anarchy, modesty versus lust) in a way that works doubly, both exerting authority through the appropriation of a conservative stance and simultaneously destabilizing the very binary models upon which such conservative ideology is based. By examining first her montage of quarreling quotations, and then the provocative doubling of Wells-Barnett's own voice, in the following essay I will chart the lessons that she provided her readers in the multiplicity of political discourse.

I. THE DYNAMISM OF QUOTATIONS

Ida B. Wells-Barnett spoke, wrote, and organized throughout what now appears to be the “nadir” of post-slavery racial relations in this country: 1880-1920.¹ Virtually two generations of prominent activist figures such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey all knew her and exchanged ideas with her. She edited and wrote for a number of widely read Black newspapers, took her one-woman anti-lynching crusade throughout the British Isles, and (notwithstanding an apparently prickly personality) proved a catalyst for the burgeoning Black women's club movement of the 1890s and beyond. Later, she reared four children while continuing her political activities: in spite of a possibly conflicted attitude about her appropriate role (as evidenced by periodic, truncated “retirements” from the public sphere), Wells-Barnett's life finally proved a revolutionary model of working motherhood. She went on to become a noteworthy figure in a number of anti-racist organizations, and was for many years the head of a controversial hostel for newly urbanized poor Blacks.²

In the last twenty years, her work has received more attention than at any time since her death. In 1970, her daughter Alfreda Duster edited Wells-Barnett's autobiography, Crusade for Justice, a book that Elizabeth Fox-Genovese describes as shaped by the need to “bear witness … to Black powers of survival” and “white oppression” (160).³ The preceding year, Arno Press had released On Lynchings, an edition of Wells-Barnett's three most influential pamphlets, two of which, Southern Horrors and A Red Record, serve as the focus of this essay. In recent years, scholars Dorothy Sterling, Hazel Carby, Bettina Aptheker, Angela Davis, Mildred Thompson, Joanne Braxton, and Paula Giddings have all considered Ida B. Wells-Barnett's contribution to the struggle for Black and women's rights.

With these writers, I am struck by Wells-Barnett's uncannily avant-garde political analyses and insights. She insisted upon the economic and political motivations for lynching and its linkage to the movement for Black disfranchisement in the South, refuting throughout her career the widely accepted notion that the alleged rape of white women by Black men “caused” the phenomenon of Lynch Law. Her calls to action likewise evidence a keen political sophistication: in the final chapter of Southern Horrors, entitled “Self-Help,” she poses not only economic analyses of racial problems, but economic solutions. She calls both for international exertion of financial pressure and for labor strikes in the South itself:

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.

(Horrors 22)

As part of her prescription here for “self-help,” Wells-Barnett summons widespread support of the Black press. She states that “[t]he Afro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth,” and “one of the most necessary things for the race to do is to get [the] facts [about lynching] before the public. The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press” (Horrors 23). Importantly, though, for her own educational objectives concerning “knowing” and reading, in A Red Record Wells-Barnett remains “safe from the charge of exaggeration” by quoting figures, not from a Black newspaper, but from “compilations made by white men” in the Chicago Tribune. She explains her tactic of quotation: “Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned” (Record 15).

In an example of exactly this strategy, Wells-Barnett augments the Tribune's stark, incriminating statistics with extensive quotations from Memphis newspapers like the Daily Commercial and the Evening Scimitar. Joanne Braxton has described Wells-Barnett's heavy use of quotation as a “strategy of authentication,” one that evidences “concern for setting the record straight,” while resulting in an unfortunate “choppiness of form” (125, 128, 129). While the authenticating drive is readily apparent in Wells-Barnett's texts, I'd like to argue that the inclusion of all these quotations serves two significant strategic purposes. First, she works to defuse the power of the mainstream press by alerting readers to its rhetoric. Often, to sensitize her audience to ideologically loaded language, Wells-Barnett “flags” it with her trademark, a sarcastic question mark in parentheses. For instance:

One by one the Southern states have legally (?) disfranchised the Afro-American. …

(Southern Horrors 13)

[Of a lynching crowd forming] This boat left Cairo at twelve o'clock, Thursday, with nearly three hundred of Cairo's best (?) citizens and thirty kegs of beer on board.

(Red Record 38)

These bracketed question marks served to train the discriminating reader to internalize the inquiring mode of their skepticism. As we shall see, Wells-Barnett appropriates much of the rhetoric to which readers become sensitized through her quotations and commentary, and lobs it back at the perpetrators of Lynch Law, particularly the accusation of “inhumanity” and “fiendishness.”

The excerpted passages serve a second function, as well. Perhaps these texts work most urgently to prove a causal convergence between racist language and racial violence. For Wells-Barnett, printed words are neither empty nor theoretical. Words interact with the material world: often they inflame, and potentially, they liberate or destroy. She begins Southern Horrors with a dialogue first transacted on Memphis editorial pages, one that could have cost her her life had she been in town at the time of publication. This entire opening narrative is a test case for the interplay between printed words and material action. In 1892 Wells-Barnett had been co-owner and editor for Free Speech, a Black journal published in Memphis. Without initially acknowledging herself as its author, she explains that a Free Speech editorial that had appeared on 21 May 1892 had prompted a series of local editorials calling for a meeting of response. Then she reproduces two paragraphs from her own article, still anonymously. Immediately thereafter, she quotes the Daily Commercial, which itself includes one of the two very same, just-quoted paragraphs, couched now in language of bile, threat, and outrage. The repetition of her words in this antagonistic context makes clear how the direction of reader reception can work to escalate hostilities:

“A negro organ printed in this city, in a recent issue publishes the following atrocious paragraph: ‘Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves, and public sentiment will have a reaction: and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.’”

“The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence of the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it. There are some things the Southern white man will not tolerate. … We hope we have said enough.”

(Horrors 5)

But the Evening Scimitar, Wells-Barnett proceeds to relate, went on to say more, threatening the Free Speech author with branding and a “surgical operation with a pair of tailor's shears” (implying a misguided gendering of the “black scoundrel”). These editorials effectively rallied a lynch mob. Wells-Barnett wisely remained in New York, her fellow Free Speech editors fled town, and the paper immediately shut down operations. In a move that strongly supports her argument regarding the culpability of the mainstream Southern press, Wells-Barnett drives home the solid class profile of her would-be lynchers: “[T]hreats of lynching were freely indulged, not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—but by the leading business men, in their leading business centre [the Cotton Exchange Building]” (Horrors 5). Here we see only one (particularly close-to-home) example among many offered of the daily papers' pivotal role in the perpetuation of Lynch Law. This story provides an evocative beginning for Southern Horrors. It illustrates the impact not only of the white press, but—more crucially for the activist—of the African-American press, which latter proves of urgent interest to Blacks and whites alike. In When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, Paula Giddings directly credits the nationally decreased number of lynchings after 1893 to Wells-Barnett's crusade as a speaker and trend-setting journalist in the African-American press. More specifically, Giddings points out that in Memphis, “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” (92).

The conversation of quotes in A Red Record becomes a rhetorical duel in an astonishing chapter entitled “Miss Willard's Attitude,” which etches out the battle waged between Wells-Barnett and Women's Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard in the early 1890s. Both were powerful women with strong public personae, both were expert speakers and pamphleteers, but their divergences, more than their similarities, are manifested here. The fight began while both visited England to publicize their causes in 1894. Willard accused Wells-Barnett of slander for the latter's remarks that Willard had condoned lynching. In a typical move, Wells-Barnett here cites at length her own editorial responses, which quote earlier speeches of Willard's and damningly prove true Wells-Barnett's portrait of the temperance leader's position. At the time, an argument erupted, each calling for the other to recant earlier statements, and each refusing. In A Red Record, Wells-Barnett lets Willard's own printed language incriminate her, language which includes the swaggering syntax of threat, despite Willard's squeamishly feminized moral stance. Quoting Willard at length, Wells-Barnett then makes explicit the violence she sees emanating from Willard's rhetoric: “The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be dominated by the Negro so long as his altitude reaches no higher than the personal liberty of the saloon,” Wells-Barnett quotes Willard as saying. And again, “[T]he fact is that illiterate black men will not vote at the South until the white population chooses to have them do so.” Wells-Barnett then explicates Willard for her readers, pointing out that “here we have Miss Willard's words in full, condoning fraud, violence, murder at the ballot box; rapine, shooting, hanging, and burning” (Record 83-84, emphases added).

With a similar sensitivity to the logical outcome of rhetorical ploys, Wells-Barnett goes on to present and analyze a W.C.T.U.-proposed “anti-lynching” resolution printed in December of 1894. The resolution reads in part:

“Resolved, that the National W.C.T.U. … is utterly opposed to all lawless acts … and urges these principles upon the public, praying that the time may speedily come when no human being shall be condemned without due process of law; and when the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness shall be banished from the world, and childhood, maidenhood, and womanhood shall no more be the victims of atrocities worse than death.”

(Record 88)

In response, Wells-Barnett reiterates her well-substantiated claim that the myth of the black rapist makes an indefensible excuse for lynching, since less than one-third of lynch victims were even accused of the crime of rape. She also notes how the resolution's language downplays the brutality of lynching by pitting its comparatively bland “lawlessness” against the culturally loaded references to “atrocities worse than death.”

Despite these facts this resolution which was printed, cloaks an apology for lawlessness, in the same paragraph which effects to condemn it, where it speaks of “the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness.”

(Record 88)

Of course, both writers engage wholeheartedly in the production of rhetoric as powerful as can be managed. Neither Wells-Barnett's invocation of statistics nor her exposé of her opponents' stylistic effects implies that she herself embraces a “plain speech” approach to language. She quotes Willard employing dehumanizing language; a page later she herself fires off an equally dehumanizing (and perhaps more telling) trope:

[She quotes Willard] “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog shop is its center of power.”

[Wells-Barnett] [The W.C.T.U.'s] great heart, which concerns itself about humanity the world over, was, toward our cause, pulseless as a stone.

(Record 84, 86, emphases added)

We must draw one distinction here between the two rhetoricians, beyond the obvious divergence in justifiability. While Willard refuses to acknowledge the impact of language upon the material world, Wells-Barnett makes exactly this her subject. To wit: their conflict continues, and in a description of a “private talk” between the two women, Wells-Barnett depicts Willard as saying, “I must not blame her for her rhetorical expressions—that I had my way of expressing things and she had hers” (89). Wells-Barnett concludes her chapter like this:

[M]y love for the truth is greater than my regard for an alleged friend who … misrepresents in the most harmful way the cause of a long suffering race, and then unable to maintain the truth of her attack excuses herself … by the wave of a hand, declaring [as Willard did in print] that “she did not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used.” … When the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarianism by fastening upon a whole race the obloquy of the most infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today and tomorrow to repudiate the apology by declaring it a figure of speech.

(89-90)

Dazzingly, Wells-Barnett insists upon the harm caused by violent language and critiques Willard's evasion of responsibility for her own words.

The flip side of this linkage between racist language and racist violence manifests itself eerily in Wells-Barnett's troubling descriptions of lynchings themselves. Several of these accounts depict the attackers' final gesture as one of writing, etching their claims to ascendancy upon the supposedly emancipated but forcibly repossessed body of the victim. She quotes the Chicago Record for 21 September 1893: “A squad of twenty men took the negro Smith … and hanged him from a hickory limb. … They riddled his body with bullets and put a placard on it saying: ‘This is Mayor Trout's friend’” (Record 47).

A particularly gruesome account of an 1891 lynching culminates similarly in the mob's effort to communicate its seizure of political power to another rare official who refused to collude with Lynch Law. Wells-Barnett includes the photograph of the lynching scene which the mob leaders sent to one Judge A. W. Tourgee of Mayville, New York, and she reproduces, too, a facsimile of the message they inscribed on the back of the photograph of their victim's body:

This S.O.B. was hung at Clinton, Ala. Friday Aug 21/91 for murdering a little boy in cold blood for 35^¢ in cash. He is a good specimen of your “Black Christian hung by White Heathens.” With the Compliments of, The Committee.

(Record 56)

Another example:

A dispatch which describes [an Alabama] lynching, ends as follows. “Upon his back was found pinned this morning the following: ‘Warning to all Negroes that are too intimate with white girls. This the work of one hundred best citizens of the South Side.’”

(Record 65)

By documenting such gestures, Wells-Barnett renders her central claim convincing: lynching must not be understood as a crime of passion, impelled by Black men's heinous assaults upon white Southern women. Rather, above all else, the lyncher uses the Black body and the Black life as a medium, upon and through which he transmits an economically motivated, political message.

During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body. … But Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro's body were lost. … In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.

(Record 7-8)

By making the killed Black body the site of a message transmitted to the Black population and between white men, Lynch Law both literally and symbolically strips the Black individual of his or her human agency, violently forcing the victim to resume the status of an object. The most troubling among the voices in conflict here recorded, this ultimately violating message-making takes its place in Wells-Barnett's clashing patchwork of quotations. In the face of this bloody quarrel, recorded in red, Wells-Barnett's own voice opens up to reveal potential solutions.

II. THE POLYPHONY OF THE POLITICAL VOICE

We have seen how Wells-Barnett's collaging of quotations from contemporary newspapers and journals seems designed to educate the reader about the nature and the power of politically loaded language. We have seen, too, that though she presents herself as a great “lover of truth,” this by no means precludes her use of a whole vocabulary of current tropes and figures to make her point. Frederick Douglass, in the letter which Wells-Barnett included as a preface to Red Record, wrote admiringly that in her writing, the “naked and uncontradicted facts … speak for themselves.”⁴ I would suggest that when Wells-Barnett's “facts” “speak,” however, they speak multiply, making their meaning on more than one level and embracing, rather than fending off, certain compelling internal contradictions. This is due neither to ambivalence nor to deceit, but simply to her savvy evaluation and production of political language. As the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has taught us, political discourse draws always on the boisterous, multi-tongued conversation that comprises the rhetorical fabric of a society's political life at any given moment. As often as not, diametrical opponents in this conversation shape their arguments with the same ideological constructs. The lack of a fixed uniformity in Wells-Barnett's work, then, does not weaken her position. On the contrary, a look at her treatment of several culturally loaded dichotomies suggests that the double valencing of much of her narrative proves to be a means by which the text renders itself authoritative.

THE WEAK RACE AND THE WINCHESTER

In the preface to Southern Horrors, Wells-Barnett writes that she has “dipped [her] hands into the corruption here exposed” because of the “prejudice [that ‘Judge Lynch’] fosters and the strain it places against the good name of a weak race.” This depiction of the African-American people as a “weak race,” downtrodden, victimized, and needing the protection of a philanthropic white population, Wells-Barnett employs quite earnestly and often, but she also resists it grimly. Indeed, at points she expresses real anger at fawning Black gratitude, even her own. Regarding an instance of extremely tepid support from Frances Willard, Wells-Barnett bitterly writes, “I was so thankful for this crumb of her speechless presence that I hurried off to the editor of Fraternity and added a postscript to my article blazoning forth that fact” (Record 85). Furthermore, although she occasionally presents African Americans as passive and victimized, another portrait emerges in her writing, most clearly delineated in a very activist chapter in Southern Horrors, entitled “Self-Help.” We have already seen how her proposals here include a call for labor strikes and for support of the African-American press; additionally, she makes another famous recommendation: “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, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give” (Horrors 23).

This pivotal dichotomy in her work, between a well-armed race and a “weak” one applying for protection, illustrates that Wells-Barnett's pamphlets are double narratives. On the one hand, they have a somewhat conservative, conciliatory aspect to them; this was typical among Black women writing in the post-Reconstruction era, operating as they were under the pressure to disprove what Herbert Gutman has dubbed “retrogressionist” stereotypes of the “savage” Black temperament (Dickson 114). This task of disproval was particularly acute for African-American women, who were influenced by the Victorian belief in woman's moral superiority. Claudia Tate has depicted the work of Black women writers of the 1890s as “reaffirm[ing] … their belief that virtuous women like themselves could reform their society by domesticating it” (19). Though Tate writes about domestic novelists rather than political journalists, Wells-Barnett, too, seems to draw some of her moral authority from the period's conviction that women were—or ought to be—upholders of important civic values. Simultaneous with this rather traditional line of social prescription, however, a profoundly radical strain of political analysis, far more challenging of the status quo, runs through Wells-Barnett's texts. As we have just seen, these double strands are evident in contradictions which Wells-Barnett allowed to stand between one section and another. They also manifest themselves in language which can be read on more than one level, as will become clear.

To drive home her point, Wells-Barnett often employs binary oppositions that were standard, immediately recognizable in her day. In so doing, she simultaneously invokes and disrupts a conservative ethical model. Although authorial intention is perhaps a mystery forever beyond the purview of the critic, I suggest that Wells-Barnett would not want to refute either level of meaning. Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, suggests that Wells-Barnett saw herself above all as upright, and that unlike some progressive thinkers, she did not design a sense of self around the notion of her own polarization from the mainstream; rather, her unflagging, keen radicalism was experientially part of a stern ethical code. Its source in no way undermines its essential progressivism, however.

Wells-Barnett's use of hegemonic rhetoric serves the conservative function of meeting the dominant paradigm on its own ground, but it also works to undermine the ideological apparatus by exposing and fracturing the culturally dominant key binary oppositions that occur in her texts. Wells-Barnett's authorial presence surpasses her use of the ideological constructs of the dominant discourse. She stands outside that discourse: in order to craft the entire, multi-layered work, in order, too, to make a move as radical as is her suggestion of armed “self-help,” and paradoxically, in order to voice her mimicry despite the posited voicelessness of the Black woman, she must exceed and transcend the constructs she mimics so successfully.

In Southern Horrors and A Red Record, Wells-Barnett structures her argument against lynching by pitting civilization against savagery, law and order against anarchy, and upright sexual modesty against licentious, animalistic lust. These are all immediately familiar, conventional binary models: a rather conservative rhetorical choice, it would seem.

The first apparent twist is simply that she uses these binaries in an inverted fashion: the “shocking savagery which would have disgraced the Congo” is perpetrated by white Americans, indeed, by “leading business men” (Record 50, Horrors 5). The peaceful, law-abiding citizens are Black, while the unruly hordes who threaten law and order are white. And in perhaps her most incendiary inversion, the sexually respectable and restrained members of society here are the Black citizens, while the rapists and the “Delilahs” are white. Initially, by setting things up this way, Wells-Barnett seems simply to point out the hypocrisy of people who preach virtue and practice vice. However, the effects of her inversions extend further, actually destabilizing these binaries with her topsy-turvy invocations of them.

First, she defies the very framework of the Black-white binary which is American racism by claiming her own access to the conservative stance as a Black woman writer. In so doing, she refuses to enact the Otherness—the savagery, the unruliness, the carnality, the animal incoherence—that the Black individual must embody if whites are to claim the opposing virtues as their own. Her act of appropriation, then, cannot help but destabilize the models she employs. Second, in each individual case, Wells-Barnett uses further means to upset the ideologic construction. We will see that the inversions are not tidy enough to leave the structure of the binary intact.

THE CIVILIZED MAN AND THE SAVAGE

Wells-Barnett makes certain that we remember how very loaded the paradigm of savagery was in the Southern context, by including quotations such as this one from the “Christian (?) Bishop Haygood” of Georgia. Haygood justifies the torture and lynching of a known imbecile by describing his crime like this: “[The victim was] first outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity” (Record 26, emphases added). Wells-Barnett fights the assumptions underlying such figures, poking at the ethnocentric underpinnings of the civilized/savage split by undermining its assumed geographic and racial correlates. Indeed, her account of the above lynching incident begins with a claim that pits “Lynch Law” against “civilized society”: “[A]ll civilized society surrounds human life with a safeguard, which prevents the execution of a criminal who is insane. … But Lynch Law has no such regard for human life” (Record 21).

For Wells-Barnett, there are dark-skinned savages in the Congo and there are white-skinned “barbarians” prominent in your community. Actually, the first quotation here places the lynchers, entirely incapable of sentiment, somewhere beneath savagery:

[T]he Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would have wrung admiration from the hearts of savages. …

(Record 9)

The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish lynchings of Afro-Americans which have recently taken place and was meant as a warning.

(Horrors 5, emphasis added)

To justify their own barbarism, [the lynchers] assume a chivalry which they do not possess.

(Record 13, emphasis added)

If, following her direction, one were to redraw the lines that divide civilization and savagery, one would be forced to question the entire imperialist project, resting as it does on a racist belief in the white Westerner's superiority and his “civilizing” mission. Considering her charting of the white Southerners' ruthless barbarism, we can imagine one of Wells-Barnett's parenthetical question marks following the reference to “cannibals and savage Indians” here in the penultimate chapter of A Red Record:

Surely the humanitarian spirit of this country which reaches out to denounce the treatment of the Russian Jews, the Armenian Christians, the laboring poor of Europe, the Siberian exiles and the native women of India—will no longer refuse to lift its voice on this subject. If it were known that the cannibals or the savage Indians had burned three human beings alive in the past two years, the whole of Christendom would be roused, to devise ways and means to put a stop to it.

(97)

Here, Wells-Barnett explicitly invokes the “missionary” zeal of imperialist philanthropy—invokes it in order to test its drawing of borders.

LAW AND ORDER VS. ANARCHY

Wells-Barnett denounces the lynch mobs' flagrant disregard for the letter of the law when they steal prisoners from their cells and “punish” them without benefit of a legal trial. Indeed, she poses her central demand as judicial: “[W]e demand a fair trial by law for those accused of crime, and punishment by law after honest conviction” (Record 97). She seems simply to be rejecting mobocratic “anarchy and outlawry” in favor of law and order: even while she wrests the language of “inhuman savagery” from the throats of the white supremacist press, this appears at heart a fairly conservative move. Indeed, we must not throw away the straightforward, conventional reading which lies close to the surface of much of Wells-Barnett's rhetoric. On one level of signification, I believe, Wells-Barnett does suggest a rather conciliatory willingness to accept the law as is. Yes, she recognizes its inequities, but as a member of a good, even-tempered, reasonable race wishing only for its “weakness” to be mitigated, she agrees to work within the system and abide by the law, like any respectable citizen.⁵

However, at the same time as this line of reasoning makes its “unimpeachable” effect in the text, again we find a deeper challenge of the entire bipolar model at work. After all, Wells-Barnett depicts mob rule as “a system of anarchy and outlawry,” one which too often has gone unnoted and has thus become entrenched and methodized.

Thus acts the mob with the victim of its fury, conscious that it will never be called to account. Not only is this true, but the moral support of those who are chosen by the people to execute the law is frequently given to the support of lawlessness and mob violence. The press and even the pulpit, in the main either by silence or open apology, have condoned and encouraged this state of anarchy.

(Record 24)

She offers examples of sheriffs, mayors, even governors like Governor Tillman of South Carolina, who collude in their official capacities with the mobs. She goes even further than the condemnation of individual government officials, though, when she cites “the oft-repeated slogan: ‘This is a white man's country, and the white man must rule’” (Horrors 13). At one point, she states boldly that “[t]he entire system of the judiciary in this country is in the hands of white people. To this add the fact of the inherent prejudice against colored people” (Record 36). Now, if the country's entire legal system is inherently racist, as her “oft-repeated slogan” would suggest, then the law and order which Wells-Barnett invokes here must be a new order indeed.

THE VIRGIN AND THE WHORE

In Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, Hazel Carby writes incisively about the interdependence of the ideologies surrounding Black and white female sexuality in the antebellum period. She argues that in order to understand “the cult of true womanhood,” one must recognize its “dialectical relationship with the alternative sexual code associated with the black woman” (30).

Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was nevertheless used to define what those boundaries were. The contradictions at a material and ideological level can clearly be seen in the dichotomy between repressed and overt representations of sexuality and in the simultaneous existence of two definitions of motherhood: the glorified and the breeder.

(30)

Wells-Barnett, writing about thirty years after Emancipation, operated within a social context molded by antebellum sexual ideology. In fact, as the innovations of Reconstruction lost ground to a new era of violence and domination, a vigorous re-invocation of this ideology was underway. Perceptions of racially determined female sexuality were, not surprisingly, linked to notions about the sexuality of men, and the posited threat of the Black rapist had become the central excuse for Lynch Law. Wells-Barnett illustrates this:

[I]n spite of the fact that there had been no white woman in Memphis outraged by an Afro-American, and that Memphis possessed a thrifty, law-abiding, property-owning class of Afro-Americans, the “[Daily] Commercial” of May 17 [1892], under the head of “More Rapes, More Lynchings” gave utterance to the following: [She quotes a long passage from the article, which can be typified by these remarks:] “Nothing but the most prompt, speedy and extreme punishment can hold in check the horrible and bestial propensities of the Negro race. … No man can leave his family at night without the dread that some roving Negro ruffian is watching and waiting for this opportunity. …”

(Horrors 16)

Angela Davis, in “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” effectively treats the topic of a supposedly out-of-control Black sexuality as it was projected onto both genders:

The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous. For once the notion is accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality. If Black men have their eyes on white women as sexual objects, then Black women must certainly welcome the sexual attention of white men. Viewed as “loose women” and whores, Black women's cries of rape would necessarily lack legitimacy.

(182)

One could argue that perhaps Davis's construction here would be more historically accurate if it were reversed: that the insatiable African-American woman, as posited by a slaveholding class wanting to excuse the rape of female slaves, was a precursor to the fictional Black male rapist, that the ideologies that allowed the use of Black women as breeders led to the projection of a threateningly virile Black male, rather than vice versa. Paula Giddings looks at Wells-Barnett's work in conjunction with the (shocking) statements of a contemporaneous scholar, Philip A. Bruce, whose 1889 book, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman, does explicitly state that immorality stems from the Black female:

In Bruce's eyes … even the Black man's alleged impulse to rape was the Black woman's fault. Historically, the stereotype of the sexually potent Black male was largely based on that of the promiscuous Black female. He would have to be potent, the thinking went, to satisfy such hot-natured women. Now released from the constraints of white masters, the Black man found white women so “alluring” and “seductive” because, according to Bruce, of the “wantonness of the women of his own race.”

(Giddings 31)

Following the lead of Frederick Douglass, Wells-Barnett points out that during the Civil War the white women of the South were left alone with African-American men without incident. The “myth of the Black male rapist,” Wells-Barnett argues, was by no means already assumed during the slavery period, but was actually only the third (and most damning) excuse that the lynchers of the post-Civil War South used to deflect criticism of the mob violence systematically being enacted against Black citizens. “There could be framed no possible excuse more harmful to the Negro … Humanity abhors the assailant of womanhood, and this charge upon the Negro at once placed him beyond the pale of human sympathy” (Record 10).

Wells-Barnett successfully exposes the short life span of this “charge upon the Negro.” Consequently, it is not surprising that throughout her pamphlets Wells-Barnett represses the subject of Black men's and women's sexual desire, thereby counteracting prevalent racist notions of the voracious Black female and the animalistic Black male. At times, this impelled repression of Black desire seems to result in a synthetically passive portrait. Importantly for the present discussion of binary rhetorical structures, Wells-Barnett's model still does need “loose women” and “animals.” Here, though, it is white women and men who play these roles. At moments in the text, she pits the victimized modesty of the Black woman against a critically drawn picture of the lascivious, alluring white “Delilah.” In this construction, she extends the passive role to Blacks of each gender:

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 succumbs to the smiles of white women.

(Horrors 6, emphases added)

A simple racial reversal of the “virgin and the whore” paradigm does not apparently threaten the interdependence between these two visions of womanhood, as traced above by Hazel Carby; the inversion seems too neat. Again, however, we discover that Wells-Barnett's construction initiates disruption. First, the white Delilahs by whom the “Afro-American Sampsons … suffer themselves to be betrayed” have the allure of the whore while still retaining the punitive power of the virginal daughter, who is almost always finally aligned with the father's interests and laws. A case in point:

There is a young mulatto in one of the State prisons of the South today who is there by charge of a young white woman to screen herself. He is a college graduate and had been corresponding with, and clandestinely visiting her until he was surprised and run out of her room en deshabille by her father. He was put in prison in another town to save his life from the mob and his lawyer advised that it were better to save his life by pleading guilty than to attempt a defense by exhibiting the letters written him by this girl.

(Record 66)

With this notion of white female sexual agency—visibly inadmissible here to the upholders of “chivalry”—Wells-Barnett's texts unsettle most radically the dichotomy between the “true woman” and the “whore.”

With the Southern white man, any mesalliance existing between a white woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge of rape. The Southern white man says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force.

(Record 11)

Over and over, using documented cases, Wells-Barnett hammers home the reality of white women voluntarily choosing romantic liaisons with Black men. As we have seen, she sometimes takes a mocking, critical tone in her description of the desire some “white Juliets” feel for their “black Romeos,” but, cumulatively, her extension of the power of sexual consent to the white woman with a Black lover does in fact afford a woman's desire some respect. When Emancipation and post-Civil War laws made control over the Black body harder, the white man took advantage of his patriarchal authority over the white female body—which he supposedly had the right and the responsibility to “protect”—to justify the murder of African-American men as “rapists.” Considering this ideological disguising of the political motivations for racial domination (a disguise Wells-Barnett astutely strips away), we can see her extension of the power of sexual consent to the white woman as a very liberating move indeed. Simultaneously, she challenges both patriarchy and racial hierarchy.

This model, then, allows for a broadened concept of “legitimate” union, which the dominant paradigm limited to heterosexual white/white relations. In slavery, of course, two Black parents had no legitimate claim on their “propertized” offspring, and all Black woman/white man couplings were unregulated, while all Black man/white woman relations were inherently taboo, since slavery followed the condition of the mother. Hazel Carby describes the pressing interests prompting this taboo:

That the slave followed the condition of his or her mother necessitated the raising of protective barriers, ideological and institutional, around the form of the white mother, whose progeny were heirs to the economic, social, and political interests in the maintenance of the slave system.

(31)

This ideologic restriction clearly lasted beyond the Civil War, and was re-invested with new force during the post-Reconstruction era. The economic and political underpinnings that motivated it had not changed as radically as reformers had hoped. White supremacists struggled with new urgency to maintain their material ascendancy over the newly freed Blacks—an ascendancy which had been threatened for a time by Reconstruction. Again, as Wells-Barnett drives home, the presence of this taboo against white woman/Black man relations did not at all imply that such relations never occurred, simply that when they did they were ordinarily either conducted in secret, or defined as rape, or—if the woman openly acknowledged her feelings for her lover—treated as instances of “nauseating … fearful depravity” (Horrors 8).

These pamphlets test the highly touted Southern concern for chivalry on a number of different planes. We have seen that Wells-Barnett exposes the political motivations fueling “chivalry,” and that she undermines its implications that white women have no sexual agency of their own. She also points out that “true chivalry respects all womanhood” (Record 13), whereas certain white women and all Black women fell out of the purview of Southern sanctification and therefore continued “fair game” for sexual assault.

As Wells-Barnett limns it, the white women whose “honah” was not a matter of concern were of the lower class, or “demi-monde,” as she calls it in the case of a white woman indicted for miscegenation who testified that she was Black rather than discontinue her relationship and face jail (Horrors 8). A Red Record also includes a fascinating passage on the white women from the North who, guided by “an almost divine sentiment,” came to the South as educators, “to carry light and truth to the benighted Blacks” (13). Wells-Barnett points out that “[t]he peculiar sensitiveness of the southern white men for women never shed its protecting influence about them … [since] they were ‘Nigger teachers’—unpardonable offenders in the social ethics of the South” (Record 13).

Threading their way through dense forests … thrown at all times and in all places among the unfortunate and lowly Negroes whom they have come to find out and to serve … they went about their work … without protection, save that which innocence gives to every good woman … fearing no assault and suffering none.

(Record 14)

Here we see Wells-Barnett in her “weak race” mode. She describes Reconstruction-era African Americans as “lowly” and “benighted.” To philanthropically minded Northern white women, she here extends an obsequious respect that she by no means always espoused.⁶ She also implies what seems a rather reactionary slur on the morality of Southern white women, when she suggests that these “Nigger teachers” had their “innocence” to protect them, as if only the “fallen” woman lives in danger of rape. Perhaps, though, this portrait works its greatest effect on a less conventional plane. For, above all, these women are presented as strong, independent, and capable of comfortably breaking down racial and class barriers, while the Black men among whom they worked are presented indeed as “unfortunate,” but also as civilized and decent enough to let the women go unassaulted.

But Wells-Barnett most damningly undercuts Southern chivalry by repeatedly calling attention to persecution of Black women at the hands of white men.

True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power. … Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect.

(Record 13)

Wells-Barnett suggests that, whenever he sees a living, breathing mulatto walk the streets of his hometown, the lyncher must read a different message than that which he has etched on his victim. Like the rapist's diary left open, the mixed-blood face bespeaks the limitations of a chivalric code practised by hypocrites.

III. GENDERING THE PROTESTING VOICE

In long passages of both Southern Horrors and A Red Record, Wells-Barnett creates a back-to-back, cumulative movement between cases of alleged Black “rapists” being tortured and lynched without a trial and documented instances of white rapists going unpunished for their “outrages” against African-American women and girls (i.e., Horrors 11-12; Record 68-70). The initial effect seems to be contrastive: we see a society that tolerates confirmed white rapists, but horribly tortures Black men only accused of rape. However, these passages do more than set up a contrast between white and Black men: they also place white (sexual) violence against African Americans of each gender on a continuum, for every incident recorded in these segments involves injury to a Black body.

This commonality suggests the notion of a merging of the two sexes in the ideological and symbolic formulations of “Judge Lynch.” But what is the gender of the resulting Black body? It seems that on the level of ideology the ever-threatening “Negro ruffian” is always male: all lynchings are explained away as responses to the bestiality of the Black rapist, even though statistics completely disprove such a claim and among the victims of lynching were numbered many women. However, the trait shared by the African-American victims of rape and of lynching is a forced invasion of the body, one which seems to be coded female. The lynching reports that Wells-Barnett writes or quotes very often use images of penetration that suggest a sexualized violation.

Ebenezer Fowler, the wealthiest colored man in Issaquena County, Miss., was shot down on the street … by an armed body of white men who filled his body with bullets. They charged him with writing a note to a white woman. …

(Horrors 10-11, emphasis added)

… Eph. Grizzard, who had only been charged with rape upon a white woman, had been … dragged through the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step. …

(Horrors 12, emphasis added)

[She quotes the New York Sun:] The negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne … [and] escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history. … Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body.

(Record 28, emphasis added)

In “Social Discourse and Nonfictional Prose,” Carolyn Porter describes the nineteenth-century development of an “ideological feminization of both women and Afro-Americans [as] a rhetorical staple of speeches as well as sermons. At Cooper Institute in 1863, Theodore Tilton concluded, ‘The Negro race is the feminine race of the world’” (355, emphasis added). She cites further examples of this sort of “romantic racism”:

Liberal Unitarians such as James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing … delivered sermons espousing a view of the “Negro” as inferior “in some faculties,” as Clarke put it, but “in others superior,” specifically in a “strong religious tendency” and “self-denial and self-sacrifice.” Thus the Afro-American would pose no threat once emancipated, according to Channing, who claimed “there is no reason for holding such a race in chains,” since “they need no chains to make them harmless.”

(355)

In the context of the very potent nineteenth-century definition of passivity, self-sacrifice, and submission as inherently female qualities, this rhetorical “feminization” of African Americans on the part of ostensibly anti-racist speakers of the North resonates rather chillingly with the violently imposed, bodily “feminization” I am charting in the South.⁷

The language Porter cites is also reminiscent of that employed by Wells-Barnett in what I have been calling her “weak race” mode. We begin to be able to see a gendering implicit in the dichotomy between Wells-Barnett's portraits of the African American as meek, lowly, and victimized (read “female”) on the one hand, and self-reliant, well-armed, and organized (read “male”) on the other. However, before accepting this apparent configuration, we should remember Porter's contention that the move toward “feminization” represses a more subversive notion: one of a dangerous sexual and racial power that posed “a deep-seated threat to white male authority. … For, at bottom, what women and Afro-Americans shared was not any common docility but a common threat—that of social and sexual energies out of control” (356, emphasis added). In the consideration of the texts here under investigation, I would shift Porter's remark somewhat. In Wells-Barnett's work, the oppressed figure threatens, not by her dizzying lack of control, but by seizing control of and rechanneling her own “social and sexual energies,” energies that would ordinarily be directed and restrained by society's dominating powers.

Now, ostensibly, Wells-Barnett aligns herself completely with the project of recouping (and arming!) an African-American manhood that has suffered two centuries of oppression. Her text even presents itself as a direct mouthpiece for that manhood struggling for self-assertion:

[The New South's] white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting … for the subjugation of the young manhood of that race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of 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.

(Horrors 20)

… the Negro feels today that after all the work he has done, all the sacrifices he has made, and all the suffering he has endured, if he did not, now, defend his name and manhood from this vile accusation [that of being given to rape], he would be unworthy even of the contempt of mankind. It is to this charge that he now feels he must make answer.

(Record 10-11)

Does such an explicit embracing and voicing of the Black man's project also allow Wells-Barnett to speak as a Black woman? Does her language self-consciously represent the Black woman's struggle for empowerment in the way that it does for the Black man? In a way, the answer to this question seems to be “no.” An anonymous poem that she includes at the end of A Red Record, addresses women predominantly in their maternal role. Their own quest for enfranchisement seems mitigated by the gender distinction the poem sets up. The first two stanzas read:

Men! Whose boast it is that ye
Come of fathers brave and free,
If there breathe on earth a slave
Are ye truly free and brave? …
Women! who shall one day bear
Sons to breathe New England air,
If ye hear without a blush,
Deeds to make the roused blood rush
Like red lava through your veins,
For your sisters now in chains,—
Answer! are ye fit to be
Mothers of the brave and free?

(Record 100, emphasis added)

Wells-Barnett's celebration of women's work as the bearers of free sons rather than as freedom fighters themselves implies that she considers it more important to articulate the race bond than to conduct a cross-racial fight for gender equality. In her autobiography, she refers enthusiastically to suffragist Susan B. Anthony, but she also records a conversation in which she mocks Anthony's belief in the liberatory possibilities of the female vote: “Miss Anthony, do you really believe that the millennium is going to come when women get the ballot?” (Crusade 230). Also in the autobiography, Wells-Barnett discusses her attempts to get African-American women motivated about women's suffrage: she remarks that what finally succeeds in rousing their interest is the ability the vote would give them to help elect a specific Black male politician (Crusade 346). Consequently, she lists race concerns—not those of gender—as the motivating factor behind Black women's political involvement and agency.

However, we should not underestimate the power and commitment of that involvement and agency simply because these women chose to align themselves with what they saw as the Black man's concerns. In her preface to Southern Horrors, Wells-Barnett extends thanks to “the noble effort of the ladies of New York and Brooklyn” for making her financially able to produce the ensuing pamphlet. She explains that their fundraising effort coalesced as a response to her famous Free Speech editorial of 1892. She then goes on to dedicate the work to “the Afro-American women of New York and Brooklyn, whose race love, earnest zeal and unselfish effort … made possible its publication” (Horrors unnumbered prefatory material). Women are financial backers, then, and posited readers, and active, organized participants in the struggle for change. Wells-Barnett helped catalyze the Black women's club movement, which was gearing up in the 1890s. By becoming politically involved, these women challenged existing notions about gender—as when Wells-Barnett broke new ground by taking her babe in arms on an anti-lynching speaking tour in 1896: “I have often referred to [this] in my meeting with the pioneer suffragists, as I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches” (Crusade 244).

And in the pamphlets, it is, after all, a woman who writes. Though she may voice the agenda of the Black man seeking to gain social empowerment, the authorial power of a woman stands present behind that agenda, and consequently defines it.

.....

In the prescriptive penultimate chapter of A Red Record, entitled “The Remedy,” Wells-Barnett urges concerned readers to

[t]hink and act on independent lines in this behalf, remembering that after all, it is the white man's civilization and the white man's government which are on trial. This crusade will determine whether that civilization can maintain itself by itself, or whether anarchy shall prevail; whether this Nation shall write itself down a success at self-government or in deepest humiliation admit its failure complete. …

(Record 98)

The stakes for “this crusade” could hardly be set higher. As we have seen, Wells-Barnett's work has prepared its reader not only to “think and act on independent lines,” but also to read independently. It disrupts the ideological models that shaped ethical and political viewpoints of the day. And it proposes—indeed enacts—a kind of seizure of agency supposedly withheld from members of racially or sexually oppressed groups.

In “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project,” Fredric Jameson invokes the Lukácsian idea that the proletariat is supremely positioned to make revolutionary analyses of social conditions, because s/he is simultaneously the subject and the object of history. Jameson suggests that we extend this notion to include all oppressed groups, each of which is objectified by society in such a way as to make it peculiarly fit to become the subject of a liberating historical exegesis. In particular, Jameson invokes feminist standpoint theory as an example of the successful use of position. This seems a helpful light in which to celebrate the work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. We can see, from the quotations which she herself culls and reproduces, the extent to which the African American was a figure of objectification in the national conversation at the century's turn. We know, too, from Porter's comments on the prevailing rhetoric of “feminization,” that then (as always) female status was inherently objectified. Remembering Lukács via Jameson, we can see Wells-Barnett's position as a Black Southern woman combining with her brilliance to inform her pamphlets with a disruptive, energetic, and, finally, liberatory perspective. Perhaps it was just this capacity that W. E. B. DuBois was celebrating when, in The Souls of Black Folk, he invoked the “double-consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others,” that gave to the African American the gift of “second sight” (8).⁸ It is this second-sightedness, this perspective, that allows Wells-Barnett to teach her readers how to “think and act on independent lines,” and that makes her pamphlets the progressive spurs to action that they proved.

Notes

1. Claudia Tate cites Rayford W. Logan as the first to use this term to depict the post-Reconstructionist period (235, n29).

2. Wells-Barnett's organization for this hostel challenged the elitism of some of her fellow activists, who preferred to extend their allegiances only to the “best” of the race. See Crusade for Justice 297.

3. Duster, who has been active for many years in a variety of social programs, was the subject of a fascinating interview conducted as part of the Black Women's Oral History Project carried out by Radcliffe College's Susskind Library.

4. Letter to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 25 October 1892, Frederick Douglass Collection, Library of Congress.

5. If I have any argument with Angela Davis's fine treatment of Wells-Barnett's work in Women, Race and Class, it would be that Davis seems to want to invalidate this less revolutionary function in Wells-Barnett's narrative.

6. See Crusade for Justice for numerous instances of her irritation with the condescensions of such white activists. Wells-Barnett declined to join the NAACP in 1910, though she attended the founding meeting, because of her concern over the too-forceful presence of white chairperson Mary White Ovington, who “made little effort to know the soul of the Black woman” (328).

7. A latter-day instance of such stripping away of Black agency can be found in C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. While this book was important at the time of its publication and contains much useful scholarship, Woodward tends to represent African-American Southerners only as passive victims. Race relations seem oddly top-heavy in his account, from which the Black will seems evacuated. When, in the second half of the book, Black activism (or even Black agency) finally surfaces, Woodward employs the passive voice to discuss it. In effect, this seems a misrepresentation after exposure to the vigorous work of Wells-Barnett and her African-American activist contemporaries. In the following paragraph, note the passive construction; note, too, the questionable concept of a “restoration” of rights:

   The war aroused in the Negroes a new hope for restoration of their rights and a new militancy in demanding first class citizenship. More than 360,000 of them entered military service and a large part of those saw overseas duty in uniform. More joined the exodus of migration to the North in quest of high wages in war industries. Temporary prosperity gave them new hopes and desires that needed fulfillment, and official propaganda picturing American participation in the war as a crusade for democracy raised the natural demand for a little more democracy at home.

   (Woodward 100, emphasis added)

8. Thanks to the work of my colleague, Cynthia D. Schrager, for helping me make this connection.

Works Cited

Aptheker, Bettina. Introduction. “Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views.” By Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Ed. Bettina Aptheker. American Institute for Marxist Studies, Occasional Paper n25. New York: AIMS, 1977. 1-21.

———. “Woman Suffrage and the Crusade Against Lynching, 1890-1920.” Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982.

Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of The Negro People in the United States. Pref. by W. E. B. DuBois. New York: Citadel, 1951.

Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983.

Dickson, Lynda F. “Toward a Broader Angle of Vision in Uncovering Women's History: Black Women's Clubs Revisited.” Black Women in United States History. Vol. 9. Ed. Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Carlson, 1990. 103-19.

DuBois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life From the Last Decades of Its First Century. New York: International, 1968.

———. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women.” Black Women in United States History, vol. 9. Ed. Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Carlson, 1990. 155-74.

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantam, 1985.

Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

Jameson, Fredric. “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project.” Rethinking Marxism 1.1 (1988): 49-72.

Porter, Carolyn. “Social Discourse and Nonfictional Prose.” Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 345-63.

Sterling, Dorothy. Black Foremothers: Three Lives. 2nd ed. New York: Feminist P, 1988.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Thompson, Mildred I. Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930. Black Women in United States History. Vol. 15. Ed. Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Carlson, 1990.

Voloshinov, V. N. (aka Mikhail Bakhtin). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar P, 1973.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Ed. Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

———. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. On Lynchings. New York: Arno P and the New York Times, 1969.

———. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894. On Lynchings. New York: Arno P and the New York Times, 1969.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford UP, 1957.