by Mia Bay
Such emotions may have torn at Wells, but they did not curb her determination—throughout her life she would rarely back down in a fight. On that fateful day in 1883, Wells ended up on the next station’s platform, “the sleeves of my linen duster torn out,” but otherwise unharmed and still fighting. She got off rather than accept a seat in the smoker, returned to Memphis, and promptly filed suit in Tennessee state court. Charging the Chesapeake, Ohio, Southwestern Railroad with both assault and discrimination, she complained that the conductor had “laid violent hands on her,” and that the railroad had refused to provide her with the first-class seat for which she had paid.10 And, as her lawsuit was pending, she continued to lay claim to the ladies’ car. Indeed, even before her first suit was settled, Wells found herself compelled to launch another one after being refused entry to the ladies’ car yet again in May 1884 during an excursion to Woodstock.
By that time Wells was no longer riding the train regularly, having finally obtained a teaching job in Memphis. But the one time she did return to Woodstock to visit the friends she had made there, the conductor would not even let her set foot in the ladies’ car on her return trip. With her first suit still pending, Ida must have been furious. Even before leaving Memphis, she had taken the precaution of sending her lawyer, Thomas J. Cassells, to talk to the railroad about whether she would be seated in the ladies’ car if she took the train again. Through Cassells, she had received assurances from the railroad that she “would not be disturbed anymore.” But despite her precautions and their assurances, Wells was once again man-handled by the conductor, who “put his hands upon her to push her back” as she attempted to enter the car. Left standing outside the ladies’ car, Wells refused to give the conductor her ticket, at which point he stopped the train and ordered her to get off. This time, Wells got off without a fight—“politely assisted” by the conductor.11 Left stranded outside the station, Wells then had to walk back to Woodstock, where she remained until the following day, when she was able to get a ride to Memphis in a wagon. She arrived home too late to teach her classes and was docked a day’s wages.
In filing her suits, Wells joined a long line of African American men and women who fought for their right to equal treatment on public means of transportation in nineteenth-century America. African Americans frequently encountered segregation or outright exclusion on steamboats, railroads, and streetcars, especially after emancipation, when all of a sudden four million African Americans were free to travel by themselves for the first time. In hearing African American challenges to segregation and exclusion, antebellum state courts typically held that common carriers such as railroads and steamboat companies were required to serve blacks, but were under no legal obligation to offer them the same accommodations as whites. As privately owned entities that served the public, they could adopt any “reasonable regulation” they chose with regard to passenger accommodations. Accordingly, an African American couple who sued after being denied a cabin on a steamboat in 1855 lost their case because the steamship company did offer them passage on deck. The court ruled that the law “gave passengers a right to passage, not a right to choose their seat.”12 However, among the arrangements commonly adopted by railroad carriers was one that complicated the practice of segregation: the ladies’ car.
For much of the nineteenth century, separate ladies’ cars and cabins were the most common of the “reasonable regulations” that transportation companies imposed on passengers. Indeed, the necessity of dividing passengers by sex was so widely accepted that as segregation cases began to multiply during Reconstruction it became the “socially irrefutable analogy for separating passengers by race.” In 1877, a lawyer defending segregation aboard the steamboat Governor Allen argued:
A male passenger, basing his right on the law of the United States, might have complained that he was not allowed a stateroom in the ladies’ cabin, with as much force and propriety as a colored passenger could have complained that he was furnished compartments and accommodations not inferior to, but different in locality, than other passengers.13
Middle-class black women such as Wells, however, posed a challenge to this analogy between race and gender. Both black and female, they defied any attempt to equate race with gender. Unlike most blacks, whose poverty confined them to the second-class smoker cars, middle-class black women could and did seek accommodations set aside for ladies. Not only were ladies’ cars smoke-free and more comfortable, they were also far safer, providing black women in particular with shelter from predatory white men, too many of whom considered sexual access to black women, willing or otherwise, an entitlement. Moreover, the letter of the law was actually on the side of African American women: by virtue of their gender they had every right to ride in the ladies’ car under common law.
As a result, case law on suits such as the two filed by Wells was complicated and contested. Black women could claim access to the ladies’ car by virtue of a “common law tradition privileging separate superior facilities for women.” And black women such as Wells took full advantage of this legal tradition, filing the majority of challenges to racial discrimination on common carriers. Indeed, African American women often won such cases, although their suits were much less successful on appeal.14 In the 1880s, however, black women’s legal options would begin to narrow as Southern states blocked off such suits by passing Jim Crow laws that explicitly separated railroad passengers by race. As Ida’s luck would have it, Tennessee introduced the first such law in 1881: a “colored car” law requiring the railroads to provide separate accommodations for black railroad passengers. No boon to African Americans, this measure was intended to block black challenges to racial discrimination on the railroads by providing legal sanction for racial discrimination.15
Yet, as can be seen in Wells’s suits, the new law had little immediate effect on actual practices. The custom of the ladies’ car continued, and no separate first-class seats were provided for black women. Accordingly, when the Wells cases went to trial in 1884, the Chesapeake had no easy defense against her charges. Holmes Cummins, the railroad’s lawyer, argued in both cases that the railroad’s smoking cars were equal in every way to the ladies’ cars that Wells had not been permitted to ride in. But his argument made little headway with the judge. He found for the plaintiff in both cases, awarding her damages in the amount of $500 for the first case and $200 for the second.
Wells had the good fortune of having her cases appear before Judge James O. Pierce, an ex–Union soldier from Minnesota, who explicitly affirmed her right to ride in the ladies’ car. Pierce dismissed her assault charges against the conductor, accepting the railroad’s argument that the conductor had acted on his own. But he recognized her right to ride in the ladies’ car, judging it to be a matter of class and gender rather than race. Wells, Pierce found, was “a person of lady-like appearance and deportment, a school teacher, and one who might be expected to object to traveling in the company of rough or boisterous men, smokers and drunkards.”16 But Pierce’s favorable assessment of Wells’s character and of her right to ride in the ladies’ car would not stand on appeal, and Wells would never receive her damages. Her early victory was fragile and transient, for, as can be seen in the wording of Pierce’s ruling, access to the ladies’ car turned on class as well as gender, and the class status of black women in the South was under constant assault.
While Wells celebrated her initial verdict, Memphis whites were appalled. DARKY DAMSEL GETS DAMAGES, The Memphis Daily Appeal huffed when the verdict was announced. “What It Cost to Put a Colored School Teacher in a Smoking Car—Verdict for $500.”17 Amused by this clunky sobriquet, Wells would forever remember being labeled a “darky damsel” and laugh about it with her children.18 But in all other respects, her confrontation with segregation was no laughing matter. The Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad appealed both cases, embroiling Wells in litigation that would last until 1887. Moreover, as the cases proceeded, Wells lost confidence in Thomas Cassells. A prominent b
lack lawyer and politician who provided Wells with able representation in her first suits, Cassells displayed little enthusiasm for litigating the appeals which followed her cases or helping Wells obtain the damages she had been awarded. After enduring a series of delays, Wells found out that “he had been bought off by the road” and promptly replaced him with James M. Greer, a white lawyer who had done some work on the original cases.19 Irate over being fired, Cassells became one of Wells’s lifelong enemies.
Still more serious was the opposition Wells faced from the railroad. Wells’s lower court victories had set a precedent that the railroad was not prepared to maintain. So in addition to appealing both cases, Holmes Cummins, the railroad’s lawyer, “tried every means in his power” to get Wells to “compromise the case.” He offered her an out-of-court settlement, which she “indignantly refused.”20 When that failed, the railroad began a “smear campaign” to discredit Wells. Exactly what kind of misinformation the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern’s lawyer spread to undermine Wells’s case is not clear. But in April 1886, Wells wrote in her diary that her case was slated to “come up before the Supreme Court some time this month and a true friend of mine has unfolded a conspiracy to me that is on foot to quash the case.” Still more obliquely, she added, “It is a painful fact that white men choose men of the race to accomplish the ruin of any young girl but that one would deliberately ask a man of reputation to encompass the ruin of one’s reputation for the sake of gain is a startling commentary on the estimation in which our race is held.”21
A diary entry a month later indicates that Wells received more information on the conspiracy from her old friend and mentor Alfred Froman. “Saw Mr. F[roman] today,” Wells wrote in May, “who told me the dirty method Mr. Cummins is using to quash my case.” Froman also attempted to intervene, ordering Cummins “to stop it.” Froman’s intervention was not successful, but he and Wells were not alone in seeing a conspiracy. The black-owned Cleveland Gazette also spoke of foul play in the Wells case, reporting that “the most ridiculous and despicable part known in the proceedings is the attempt on the part of the defendant to put up a blackmailing job and attempt to tarnish the character of the fair prosecutrix.”22
Although the details of Cummins’s attacks on Wells’s character outside the courtroom have been lost, the trial transcripts from her Tennessee State Supreme Court cases reveal that the railroad lawyer also employed character assassination in his courtroom challenges to her circuit court victories. In contesting Wells’s right to ride in the ladies’ car, the railroad lawyer questioned whether Wells was a lady, branding her instead as an overly aggressive black woman who was determined to sit where she was not wanted. In doing so, he also maintained that all seats on the railroad’s trains were equal.
Both lines of argument involved much sophistry. In one trial, Cummins called the conductor to the stand to testify that he did not allow smoking in the forward car—known as the smoker—and frequently asked people to stop; a move which Wells’s lawyer countered by introducing witnesses who had smoked in the forward car. Mocking the conductor’s blatant falsehood, her lawyer also asked why, given that smoking was not allowed in either of the train’s two passenger cars, so many people had to be discouraged from smoking in the forward car.
Ultimately, however, the case turned not on the question of smoking, but on the issue left open by Judge Pierce’s ruling—which had accorded Wells a seat in the ladies’ car because of her ladylike appearance and deportment. The railroad lawyer successfully challenged Wells’s status as a lady, using her very insistence on sitting in the ladies’ car as evidence against her. His major witness was Victoria Kimbrough, a white woman who claimed that Wells had attempted to sit beside her in the ladies’ car “sometime in November or December 1883.” Kimbrough did not even claim to have been present during either of the train rides that precipitated Wells’s suits: her testimony simply served to portray Wells as a black woman who felt entitled to seat herself next to a white woman. Although legally dubious and not accepted by the circuit court, Kimbrough’s evidence was accepted by the Tennessee State Supreme Court, which ruled against Wells in both cases. In an 1887 decision that was a blatant triumph of prejudice over logic, the judges declared that the ladies’ car and smoking car were “alike in every respect as to comfort, convenience and safety” and also accused Wells of filing suit only to “harass” the railroad company. Her “persistence” in the case, the court concluded, “was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for a short ride.”23 Also reversed were her awards for damages. Instead of receiving money, Wells ended up liable for more than two hundred dollars in court costs.
These expenses alone were no doubt devastating to the financially overextended young schoolteacher, whose monthly salary was seventy-five dollars. But a still more bitter pill to swallow was, in Wells’s eyes, the terrible insult done to African American rights. “I felt so disappointed,” Wells writes in an anguished passage in her Memphis diary, “because I had hoped such great things from the suit for my people generally.”
I have firmly believed all along that the law and the world was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel short of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now if it were possible would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them. O God is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us.24
Ida’s anguish was entirely warranted. In her 1887 diary entry she recorded the writing on the wall. We now know that the Tennessee State Supreme Court’s decision in her case was one of the many state-level stops on the road to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy v. Ferguson, another railroad case, the United States Supreme Court resolved the legal uncertainties around segregation on state railroads by affirming the constitutionality of Louisiana’s separate car act. The sweeping decision all but eviscerated the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment—which promises all Americans “equal protection before the law.” Qualifying that Reconstruction-era promise, the Court ruled: “The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”25
Least among Plessy’s effects was the demise of the ladies’ cars, which had given way to cars separated by race well before 1896. As historian Barbara Welke notes, the passing of the ladies’ car reflected the white South’s attempt to curb the self-assertion of black women such as Wells, who sought access to ladies’ accommodations as “the gender equivalent of the political and economic power that men of color had gained with freedom.”26 Plessy brought still more radical infringements on black freedom. Indeed, until it was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Plessy ruled over an era of cast-iron segregation under which blacks were required to use not only separate train seats, but separate schools, hospitals, orphanages, insane asylums, poorhouses, and public bathrooms. Segregation was still informal when Ida lived in Memphis, but by the early twentieth century signs marking everything from building entrances to water fountains as WHITES ONLY or COLORED would be ubiquitous throughout the South.
For all her forebodings about the future, however, Ida understood the grave import of her failed legal defense through the lens of the past. Even when she looked back on the case in her autobiography, she did not link Plessy v. Ferguson and the final triumph of Jim Crow with her own struggles. Instead, she mourned it as a tragic consequence of the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, which had been declared unconstitutional in 1883. Crafted by a coalition of Radical Republicans under the leadership of the fiery abolitionist hero Charles Sumner, the bill had provided federal protection for citizens’ rights under the Constitution—protection that had allowed cases similar to Ida’s to be moved to federal court. In the results of its repeal, Ida saw nothing short of the final
bitter death of Reconstruction. “The Supreme Court of the land has told us to go to the state courts for the redress of our grievances,” she reported, “but when I did I was given the brand of justice Charles Sumner knew the Negro would get when he fathered the Civil Rights Bill during Reconstruction.” The New South that emerged after Reconstruction, she noted caustically, “wanted the Civil Rights Bill repealed but did not want or intend to give justice to the Negro after robbing him of all sources from which to secure it.”27
In her autobiography, Wells was almost equally bitter about the black community’s response to her suits. She recalled that she was left with only her “salary to fall back on to help pay the costs” of the court cases. She complained that “none of my people had ever seemed to feel it was a race matter and that they should help me in the fight. So I trod the wine press alone.”28 While her long legal struggle must have placed a great and somewhat solitary strain on Wells, her memory of it may have been colored with bitterness over later experiences—in the many subsequent political battles that left her feeling that she did not have the support of her community.
At the very least, her Memphis diary, written at the time the trials were unfolding, suggests that she did not in fact battle the railroads alone. Her first response to her defeat was protective rather than dismissive of other blacks—as we have seen, she wanted to “gather my race in my arms.”29 Moreover, she both heard about and contested the smear tactics used by the railroad only through other members of her community. A “true friend” alerted her to the conspiracy, and both Alfred Froman and the editor of The Cleveland Gazette spoke out in her defense.