A full and complete confession—the last best chance.
With that in mind, three men—detective Thomas Broderick, Asbury Park’s enforcer, along with B. F. Johnson and George W. Cunningham, the Greater New York Agency detectives—waited for two days after the inquest before getting in a car and driving to the county jail in Freehold. There they asked a prison official to see the prisoner Tom Williams, and a guard took them to Williams’s cell.
The three detectives asked to go inside the cell to talk to Williams, and the guard said that would be fine. He unlocked the bars and slid them open, and the men walked inside, and the guard closed the cell door behind them with a loud clang.
CHAPTER 22 Nobody Seen Me Do It
December 4, 1910
Freehold, New Jersey
Police officers and beat reporters had a name for it—“the third degree.” It was, in the kindest possible interpretation, an interrogation technique. A way for investigators to get information out of reluctant suspects—a tactic, along the lines of good cop/bad cop, or building rapport with a prisoner. If deliberate questioning didn’t work, the third degree was a way to ratchet up the pressure, often severely.
To administer the third degree meant to either physically beat a prisoner, or psychologically browbeat him. Which of these two was used depended on the character of the interrogator, and on the perceived moral or mental weakness of the suspect. Both were meant to obliterate a prisoner’s defiance and shatter his will, leading, finally, to a confession.
In the early 1900s, third-degree tactics were commonly used in police departments across the country. They were also illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court handed down an 1896 ruling in the case of Wilson v. United States, which involved a man accused of murder and interrogated in front of a threatening mob until he gave a confession. “The true test of the admissibility in evidence of the confession of a person on trial for the commission of a crime,” the Supreme Court ruled, “is that it was made freely, voluntarily, and without compulsion or inducement.” Several other similar rulings continued to invalidate confessions that were coerced through the use of the third degree.
And yet, the practice was far from abandoned.
On December 4, 1910, the three detectives entered Tom Williams’s cell around 9:00 a.m. and showed him their badges. Williams knew Thomas Broderick from around Asbury Park, but he didn’t recognize the two other men. They explained why they were there, and said they wanted to run Williams through the events of November 9, the day Marie Smith went missing, one more time. Williams agreed to talk.
The questioning went on for hours. Broderick stayed back and let the detectives take the lead. B. F. Johnson stood over Williams and described precisely how he believed Williams had killed Marie Smith. How Williams had lurked on the edges of the woods on the north side of Third Avenue, waiting for Marie, and then snatched her and attacked her and murdered her, and carried her body deeper into the woods, to the spot where she was found, before making his escape along Brickyard Road. How Williams had gone into hiding until his arrest four days later. There was no doubt in Johnson’s voice—this is how it had happened.
We have many witnesses to verify this claim, Johnson told Williams. We have a complete case against you. The story you told has been proven false. There is no chance for you to escape all of this.
Yet Williams, as he had at every step, denied he had anything to do with the crime.
The questioning went on. All three men aggressively challenged Williams’s story, over and over, crowding him in the small jail cell. The interview stretched into its sixth hour. There is no official record of what happened in that jail cell during those hours, beyond a report filed by Johnson and Cunningham. In that report, there is no mention of any of the interrogators so much as touching Tom Williams at any time. Alvin Cliver, who spoke with the detectives before and after the interrogation, simply wrote that they “put the negro through a rigid examination in an effort to get a confession.”
Tom Williams, however, claimed the men tortured him in his cell. He told a friend, “They did pretty much everything to me except kill me.”
At the end of the questioning, the detectives dropped any pretense. Johnson described yet again how he believed Williams committed the crime, then abruptly stopped and screamed into Williams’s ear.
“You know you killed that little girl!”
“It’s a lie,” Williams said.
“But this woman swears she saw you!”
“She didn’t see me. Nobody seen me.”
Johnson paused.
“Are you sure nobody saw you?”
“I know nobody saw me,” Williams said. “Nobody seen me do it.”
It took Williams a moment to realize what he’d done.
“What am I saying?” he asked of himself.
And then, surprisingly, he laughed.
“Oh, go ahead and finish it, if you say so,” Williams said. “I guess it won’t make much difference if one more nigger gets it. It only means one less nigger.”
* * *
The headline in the Asbury Park Press, in large type spanning nearly half the length of the paper, was damning:
“NOBODY SEEN ME” DO IT SAYS NEGRO IN BLIND RAGE
Cliver’s description of the interrogation was steeped in the biased and stereotypical language of the time, florid and breathless, and clearly prejudiced against Tom Williams. The suspect, Cliver wrote, “crouched his heavy six-foot frame and, wild-eyed and panting, faced three detectives who had coaxed him up with questions until his round and wooly head apparently was near the noose.” During questioning, Williams’s eyes “narrowed into slits thru which the bloodshot white shone craftily. Then in a moment they blazed forth in rage.” The detectives “succeeded in driving the sneering bravado from his ebony face.”
And yet, through it all, Williams had not confessed. Even Johnson and Cunningham were impressed by Williams’s stubbornness. “After six or seven hours he was as strong as ever while we were tired out,” they wrote in their report. “He is no one new at this game, for he wouldn’t talk when we pressed him too close.”
Still, there were Williams’s words: “Nobody seen me do it.” Cliver’s article, with its portrait of Williams as a raging monster, implied that this assertion might be enough to finally fix Marie’s murder on Black Diamond. Cliver reported that, after their questioning of Williams in his cell, the two Greater New York Agency detectives were called back to New York City, their job in Asbury Park complete. Cliver also reported that “the Burns Agency men”—Schindler and his team—“have quit, and the case has apparently been dropped.”
Publicly, at least, the story was set. Tom Williams was the killer, and at last he’d been tricked up, shaken off his song of innocence, brought closer to his reckoning, left in his lonely cell to face his final fate.
CHAPTER 23 The Watchtower
October 5, 1892
Lyric Hall, New York City
Ida Wells tried hard not to cry. A thousand miles from home, largely friendless in a strange new city, she stood in front of hundreds of people and felt the tears coming on, and she tried to fight them off. But they came anyway—tears of loss and loneliness.
Five months earlier, a mob of white men demolished the offices of her newspaper, Free Speech, in Memphis. Wells fled to Brooklyn, New York, a sprawling city unlike any small southern town she had known. She lived by herself in a rented apartment on Gold Street, in a mostly residential neighborhood called Vinegar Hill, more commonly known as Irishtown, wedged between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There she lived under the threat “of hanging or burning at the stake,” the Boston Herald declared, should she ever dare return to her home in Memphis. Wells was thirty years old.
The same month Wells left Memphis for Brooklyn, May 1892, her friend T. Thomas Fortune offered her a weekly column in his newspaper, the New York Age. Wells took the job, she would say, with a new sense of purpose and resolve. “Having lost my paper, had a price put on
my life and been made an exile from my home for hinting at the truth,” Wells 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.”
Her first article for the Age ran across seven columns, covering nearly the entire front page of the June 25, 1892, issue. It was titled “The Truth About Lynching.” It was, in a way, a continuation of the antilynching article that led to the destruction of the Free Speech offices in Memphis, except that it was, as Wells had promised, a fuller, freer, and more graphic denunciation of the racism, terror, and violence inflicted on the colored race in the South.
It was unlike anything ever written by a black journalist before.
Wells set out to do two things: debunk the accepted premise used to justify lynching—the rape of white women by black men—and vividly describe the true horrors of lynching in a way that would change perception of the practice. “It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” she wrote. “Somebody must show that the Afro-America race is more sinned upon than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”
Wells did not hold back. She listed more than seven hundred instances of lynching, and provided the dates, places, and names of victims—“the awful death-roll that Judge Lynch is calling every week.” She described the barbaric sameness of many of the crimes—white mobs dragging black men out of jail cells; brutal hangings in town squares; already-murdered victims riddled with bullets or dismembered. “The flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the hanging of a fifteen-year-old girl in Louisiana… until the dark and bloody record of the South shows seven-hundred twenty-eight Afro-Americans lynched during the past eight years,” she wrote.
Of those victims, Wells noted, only a third had even been accused of rape; the rest were lynched under a variety of other justifications, including, in one instance, “acting sassy.” Of those charged with rape, Wells insisted most were surely innocent. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she argued. She insisted here as she had before that the charge of rape, therefore, was largely a pretense—the real aim of lynching was to keep the black race economically subjugated through the use of terror and violence. The lynching of her close Memphis friend, Thomas Moss, had, after all, been precipitated by an economic clash—Moss’s black-owned grocery posed a threat to a rival white-owned store. In the end, Moss’s lynching led to the destruction of his store, and to its stock and customers being absorbed by the very rival who saw to it that Moss was lynched.
Wells believed the same was true of most acts of mob violence against blacks across the country. The white southerner, she wrote in her autobiography, “had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, his source of income.” Without the practice of slavery to keep black citizens under their control, white southerners instead branded the Negro as a race of wild rapists—people who needed to be brutalized in order to be tolerated. By so thoroughly and graphically cataloging the reality of lynching throughout the South, Wells, for the first time, provided a solid factual argument against the foundational lie that justified the practice.
And because Wells anticipated a backlash that would suggest she’d exaggerated or fabricated her descriptions of lynching, she did something shrewd—she used only white sources for her catalog of crimes. All her information came from white journalists and white-owned newspapers, and if she made a personal observation, she backed it up with secondary reporting. These are known facts, Wells was saying—all she had done was compile them into an unspeakable whole.
Wells’s approach to the topic helped elevate the New York Age article from daring journalism to something larger and more profound. Wells’s antilynching statement would go on to become, according to the author and professor Anita August, “the founding rhetorical text in the anti-lynching movement.” Wells assembled a uniquely vivid, factual, and coherent portrait of the practice in America—the first fully contextualized analysis of lynching, and of the willful indifference of white law authorities to it, as seen from the side of the victims.
That, on its own, ensured her article’s impact. But that was not all Wells did. Despite avoiding sentimentality, she also managed to invest her writing with a deep and undeniable humanity, a beseeching demand for reason and decency. “The Truth About Lynching” was a moral clarifier, a call to action, so persuasive it could not be dismissed. Wells did not hope to reflect public opinion—she meant to shape it.
T. Thomas Fortune printed ten thousand copies of the June 25 issue of the New York Age and sent them out across the country. More than one thousand copies were sold in Memphis alone. These were not staggering numbers (black newspapers like the Age had limited circulation) but they were signs Wells now had her largest audience yet.
The article, which carried the byline “Exiled,” did produce a predictable backlash against Wells. One Boston newspaper editorial called her “a licentious defamer of Southern women” and “a harlot,” while the governor of Virginia and former Confederate colonel Charles T. O’Ferrall said “the slandering utterances of Ida Wells are calculated to do harm rather than good, and intensify rather than mollify the spirit of violence.” O’Ferrall argued that the crime of black men raping white women “caused all the lynching in the South, with rare exceptions,” and that Wells and other blacks should “frown down upon it and cry out against it, and not exert their energies to a denunciation of the lynching.”
But, crucially, Wells’s article also made it into the hands of one of the most prominent black women in Brooklyn—an accomplished schoolteacher and activist named Maritcha Remond Lyons.
Lyons began teaching in 1869, the same year she became the first black girl to graduate from Providence High School in Rhode Island. Over the years Lyons gained, as she put it, “some little recognition as an elocutionist”—a public speaker whose powerful voice could reach the highest rafters. Lyons met Ida Wells through the Brooklyn Literary Union, one of the leading literary clubs in the city. The Union held its meetings at the Everett Assembly Rooms on Willoughby Street, in halls rented out for twenty dollars an evening. In one of the Union’s featured debates, Lyons squared off with the club’s invited guest, Ida Wells. Lyons later wrote that her own performance “won the plaudits of the members.”
As for Wells, her performance in the debate gained her a lifelong friend in Lyons. Fourteen years older than Wells, Lyons was impressed by Wells’s “grit and determination,” and agreed to “coach her in the art of extempore speaking.” Lyons taught Wells her two main rules of public oratory: “1 - Be so familiar with your subject that you are literally saturated with it; think, meditate and reflect to develop all the points in logical sequence. 2 - Learn how to manage the voice; if thought is prolific, expression of ideas will become automatic.”
Not long after the debate, Lyons received her copy of the New York Age that featured “The Truth About Lynching.” The article had its desired effect—it moved Lyons to action. Together with Victoria Earle Matthews, a journalist and early reformer in Brooklyn’s black settlements, Lyons arranged local meetings to read and discuss Wells’s writings, and in the following weeks the meetings grew in size. Matthews and Lyons decided they wanted to help Wells financially—and perhaps even raise enough money to allow her to publish the Free Speech again. They organized a committee of two hundred fifty women, announced an event in honor of Wells, and invited her to give a speech to their expanding circle.
Wells agreed to attend, and a date and place were picked—October 5, 1892, at New York City’s Lyric Hall, an elegant dance palace that normally hosted wedding receptions and society balls.
* * *
On the evening of October 5, 1892, Wells crossed the Brooklyn Bridge—free for walkers, three cents for drivers—and headed north toward the Manhattan neighborhood known as Longacre Square.
Around her, the city was rising. In lower
Manhattan, the new emigrant office at Ellis Island was now processing the many millions of immigrants streaming into the city each year. A mile inland from the harbor, Joseph Pulitzer had just finished constructing the world’s tallest office building—his golden-domed, twenty-six-story World Building on Park Row. Farther north, the stately, marble, seventy-seven-foot Washington Square Arch, flanking the south end of Fifth Avenue, had just been completed. “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair,” read the inscription atop the arch. “The event is in the hand of God.”
Wells made her way north to 42nd Street, the wide thoroughfare that spanned the island from the East River to the Hudson River. The street was anchored on Fifth Avenue by the massive, aboveground Croton Reservoir, a stone fortress with walls that were fifty feet tall and twenty-five feet thick, built to hold more than twenty million gallons of pure water piped down from the Croton River forty-five miles upstate.
One block west of the Reservoir, between 42nd and 43rd Streets on Sixth Avenue, sat Lyric Hall.
Ida Wells walked past newsboys and pretzel vendors and entered the hall, and once inside she was surprised by what she found. Matthews and Lyons had gone to some lengths to prepare the hall for her speech. Behind a large main platform, a string of lights spelled out IOLA, Wells’s pen name. The evening’s programs were designed to look like miniature copies of the Free Speech. The hall was filled with “the leading colored women” of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, Wells noted—“a brilliant array.” The event, Matthews and Lyons declared, “was the greatest demonstration ever attempted by race women for one of their number.”
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