To Tell the Truth Freely

by Mia Bay

  In addition to providing a forum for her concerns, Wells’s columns on women’s issues helped her to advance in the newspaper business, where she was increasingly in demand both as one of the country’s few black women journalists and as a political reporter whose gender made her work a “novelty.” Although she continued to make her living as a teacher, in 1886 Wells was elected editor of The Evening Star (Memphis), and also became a regular correspondent for The American Baptist Magazine, a national publication which offered her “the lavish sum of one dollar weekly.”78 Thereafter, the network of publications that solicited and featured Wells’s work increased steadily and soon included the A.M.E. Church Review, The Indianapolis World, the Kansas City Dispatch, and The American Baptist.

  This unflattering drawing of Wells appeared in The Indianapolis Freeman.

  By the late 1880s, Wells was one of the most prolific and well-known black female journalists of her day. Her nickname “Iola, Princess of the Press” marked Wells’s increasing visibility in the profession, which stemmed not only from her publications but also from her involvement with the National Colored Press Association, which she attended as a representative of the Little Rock Sun in 1887, the first year that organization welcomed women. She came back from the meeting “tickled pink over the attention I received from those veterans of the press.”79 Evidently Wells made a good impression on the pressmen as well; the following year saw her elected first assistant secretary. Not surprisingly, the attractive young woman was evaluated on her appearance as well, with one commentator deeming her “pleasant-faced,” while another wrote of an unflattering drawing of Wells published in a Louisville paper, “Iola will never get a husband so long as she lets these editors make her so hideous.”80 Never indifferent to comments on her appearance, Wells complained about the sketch, only to face further mockery from a columnist in The Indianapolis Freeman, who told her that she need not “be pretty as well as smart,” since “beauty and genius were not always companions.”81

  But evaluations of her feminine charms were the least of Ida’s concerns when it came to her journalism career. On attending her first Colored Press Association meeting, she gave a paper titled “Woman in Journalism, How I would edit,” which expressed her ambition to edit her own paper.82 Still poorly paid as a writer, Ida had decided that there would be more money in journalism if she published her own work, and in 1889 she purchased a one-third interest in a new paper, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In doing so, she joined forces with the paper’s founders and co-owners: the Reverend Taylor Nightingale, who also presided over the Beale Street Baptist Church, where the paper was published and sold, and J. L. Fleming. Fleming was the former editor of a black paper published in Marion, Arkansas—The Marion Headlight, where Wells had published several articles in the past. Fleming’s collaboration with Nightingale had begun in 1888 when he was forced out of Marion by armed white men intent on eliminating African Americans from local politics. Despite Fleming’s background in journalism, Wells soon become editor of Free Speech, while Fleming served as its business manager and Nightingale managed sales. With the well-known Iola at the helm and the support of Nightingale’s large congregation, whose members bought at least five hundred copies every Sunday, the paper thrived.

  Free Speech was soon in the black and not a moment too soon, since Ida’s days as a teacher were numbered. In the end, it was not Wells’s mixed feelings about teaching but her opinionated journalism that ended her career as a teacher. Already disliked by some black leaders in Memphis for her critiques of black secret societies, in the winter of 1891 Wells waded into another, still more perilous controversy when she protested the conditions in Memphis’s black schools. Intimately acquainted with school affairs after many years of teaching, Wells not only complained about the “few and utterly inadequate buildings” that housed black students, but she also challenged the school board’s hiring practices. In particular, she noted that some of the teachers working in colored schools “had little to recommend them save an illicit relationship with the school board.” Though Wells had long been troubled by conditions in Memphis’s black schools and disappointed by the school board, which had not had a black member since 1886, it is not clear why she chose to comment on improprieties involving a member of the school board. Clearly, she anticipated that in doing so she might put her job in jeopardy, for in her autobiography she noted that she initially asked the Reverend Nightingale to sign the critical article, and published it under her own name only after “he refused to father it.”83 She also explained that she considered the not-so-clandestine affair between a black schoolteacher and a young white lawyer who worked for the school board and had been instrumental in securing the teacher’s job to be a “glaring evil.”84 When Wells lost her job as a consequence of the article, she told the disappointed parents of her students that she had acted on behalf of their children. But, one suspects, the tangle of sex and power in the illicit relationship she exposed galled her as much as any particular teacher’s lack of qualifications. Further, she may have reasoned that the liaison jeopardized the status of other teachers such as herself, who thereafter might be expected to trade sexual favors in exchange for employment.

  Certainly Wells was sensitive to how easily the reputations of black women could be compromised. Her own had been attacked time and again, to the point where she was ready to embrace patrolling the morality of others as her best defense. But the volatility of the color line made African American attempts to address white immorality—of any kind—a dangerous proposition. Indeed, Wells and fellow teachers were the only ones to suffer for her actions. The lawyer for the school received no censure, and he even continued to call on the teacher he had hired, “growing bolder as time went on.”85 The affair came to a tragic end only for his lover, who committed suicide when the liaison led to disapprobation from her family. Meanwhile, the other black teachers were tainted by the scandal when another Memphis paper alleged that several of them had entertained white callers. And last but not least, the article and its aftermath compromised Wells’s livelihood and reputation. She returned to school that fall only to find that the school board had revoked her teaching position. And shortly afterward she became the subject of ugly rumors about the circumstances under which she had lost her post.

  Free Speech

  Jobless and subject to scandal yet again, Wells rebounded, with a resourcefulness that demonstrated the confidence and credentials she had built up over her decade in Memphis. No longer defenseless in the face of false accusations, she reacted promptly when a black minister whom she encountered while traveling on Free Speech business drew all the wrong conclusions about the end of her teaching career, telling several young men that Wells’s dismissal was “suspicious.” Outraged, she confronted and corrected him, making him issue a public statement renouncing his insinuations. After a decade in Memphis, the orphan from Holly Springs had matured into a formidable woman, more than capable of protecting herself from gossip. Wells had established a secure place in her region’s middle-class black community, and built a network of influential friends in both the press and the pulpit—which included the unfortunate minister’s denominational superior, Bishop Henry MacNeal Turner. After years of remaining quiet in the face of attacks on her reputation, she was no longer willing to suffer in silence. Dressing down the minister, Wells told him that her “good name was all I had in the world, that I was bound to protect it from attack by those who felt that they could do so with impunity because I had no brother or father to protect it for me.”86

  Likewise, even after losing her job as a teacher, Wells was far from down and out. She had a well-established career as a journalist to fall back on, as well as her shares in Free Speech. Prior to the fall of 1891, the newspaper had not been earning enough to allow Ida to support herself without her teaching job. But after being propelled into full-time journalism by her outspokenness, Wells built up the paper’s business by using her railroad press pass to traverse the Delta se
lling subscriptions. Soon Free Speech’s circulation all but tripled, providing Wells with “an income nearly as large” as the salary she had earned while teaching. The paper’s growing revenues also allowed Wells and Fleming to buy out the Reverend Nightingale, after he attempted to use the paper to “flay” enemies in a dispute with his congregation that ultimately ended in assault charges and Nightingale’s flight to Oklahoma.87 By the time Nightingale left town Wells and Fleming had moved Free Speech out of the Beale Street Baptist Church into its own office.

  Tirelessly promoted by its charismatic female editor, the paper acquired a distinctive reputation “up and down the Delta spur of the Illinois Central Railroad.” Like its sales, its news coverage extended far beyond Memphis, offering Ida an expansive forum for her increasingly militant political journalism. The paper chronicled, for example, the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, which saw the state adopt a new constitution designed to effectively disenfranchise its black population. The key legislation was an “Understanding Clause” that limited voting rights by way of a verbal test on the constitution administered by white men convinced “that very few Negroes understood the clauses of the Constitution.”88 Bitterly disappointed by this retreat from the black voting rights enshrined in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Wells wrote an editorial excoriating Isaiah Montgomery, the convention’s only black representative, who had voted in favor of the new constitution. Although aware of the difficulties that black leaders faced in opposing powerful white interests, and later a personal friend of Montgomery, Wells had little patience with black accommodations to the politics of white supremacy. “It would have been far better to have gone down in defeat,” her editorial told Montgomery. And elsewhere she railed far more frankly against “Negroes who persecute and betray their race of their own accord to curry favor with white people and win the title of ‘good nigger.’”89

  Ida’s forthright style created controversy, but it also attracted a large and diverse readership. Among other things, Free Speech fulfilled her early ambition of explaining the world to rural black Southerners. For, as Ida noted in her autobiography, even blacks who could not read sought out copies of Free Speech—presumably for public reading by a literate member of their community. Indeed, this phenomenon was common enough that Wells and Fleming were ultimately compelled to begin to print Free Speech on distinctive pink paper, after realizing that unscrupulous vendors were substituting copies of The Police Gazette for Free Speech when selling it to people “who could not read for themselves.” The format change guaranteed that even illiterates could identify Free Speech, by “asking for the pink paper.”90

  As the editor of Free Speech, Wells was subject to still more unflattering portraits. An 1890 cartoon dramatized the lively editorial differences among black newspaper editors by portraying Wells and T. Thomas Fortune of The New York Age as small, noisy dogs barking at The Indianapolis Freeman. Inset on the upper left-hand corner of the cartoon is yet another unappealing portrait of Wells. Almost unrecognizable, except for the bun in her hair, she is dressed in men’s clothing and wistfully maintains, “I would I were a man.”

  With the success of her pink paper, Ida escaped the professional uncertainties that had plagued her for most of her adult life. She “thoroughly enjoyed” producing and promoting the paper, and felt that she had “at last found my real vocation.”91 But the increasingly militant Free Speech would not see another year before its office went up in flames at the hands of a white mob intent on driving its editor out of town. The conflagration marked the end of Ida’s sojourn in Memphis and the beginning of new challenges that would sharpen her vocation and redirect the course of her life.

  3

  The Lynching at the Curve

  THE MURDERS THAT BROUGHT IDA’S LIFE IN MEMPHIS TO A close began with nothing more momentous than a game of marbles. One night in March 1892, a group of black and white boys gathered to play marbles near two rival grocery stores. One black-owned and one white-owned, both stores were located in the heart of a predominantly black neighborhood on the outskirts of Memphis known as the Curve—which took its name from the sweeping curve made by the area’s streetcar line as it rounded the corner of the neighborhood’s central intersection. Home to a number of white and black enterprises, the Curve was not an unusual place for blacks and whites of all ages to congregate, but on this particular evening a mixed-race gathering that began with child’s play turned ugly. A fight broke out among some of the boys, the marbles game having been won by Armour Harris, who was black. The group was then joined by the father of one of the white players, Cornelius Hurst, who whipped the victorious black boy. Soon other adults arrived on the scene, including Harris’s father and several friends. When the black men “pitched in to avenge the grown white man’s flogging of a colored boy,” they were set on by several angry white men.1 Among them was the owner of the white grocery store, W. H. Barrett.

  Also drawn into the fray were two young men who rushed out of the nearby People’s Grocery, a black-owned grocery cooperative established in 1889: Calvin McDowell, the grocery’s manager, and the store’s clerk, William Stewart. Although it is not clear that either man was involved in the scuffle that took place in the Curve that night, both ended up in trouble. Their troubles began the next day, when Barrett led a police officer into the store in search of William Stewart, who he claimed had clubbed him on the head. And when Calvin McDowell came to the door and refused to identify Stewart, Barrett hit him with his pistol. The blow knocked both McDowell and the gun to the floor. An athletic young man who served in the black militia group the Tennessee Rifles, McDowell did not respond meekly. He grabbed Barrett’s gun and fired it, narrowly missing both white men. Arrested as a result, McDowell was released the next day on bond and expected to suffer no more than a minor fine. But Barrett took the altercation as an opportunity to create legal trouble for his commercial rivals, persuading a grand jury to indict the People’s Grocery owners for maintaining a public nuisance.

  So began a race war driven largely by the machinations of Barrett, whose main goal was to reclaim his monopoly over the Curve’s black business. A hostile competitor to the People’s Grocery since it first opened, Barrett proved relentless in using the unrest at the Curve as an opportunity to undermine the store’s business. After his nuisance charges were dismissed with nominal fines, he vowed to “clean out the store,” and managed to obtain arrest warrants for two black men who had protested his previous charges against the People’s Grocery.2 One of the two men named on the warrants was Thomas Moss, the president of the joint stock company that owned and operated the People’s Grocery; he and his wife, Betty, were among Ida’s best friends. In addition to harassing Moss, Barrett also upped the racial tensions around the store by spreading a rumor that a white mob was planning to attack the People’s Grocery.

  The result was deadly. Anticipating an attack, the men who worked in the store sought assistance from the Memphis police, who refused to intervene because the Curve lay just outside Memphis’s city limits. So, after consulting an attorney who told them that in the absence of police protection they were entitled to protect themselves, Moss, McDowell, and Stewart stationed armed guards around the store. Their display of force was soon tested, but not by the white mob falsely rumored of by Barrett. Rather, Barrett came back with nine deputies from the county, who had been dispatched to arrest Moss and the other man named in the warrant. Dressed in plain clothes, the deputies descended on the People’s Grocery, where they were driven away by the armed men assigned to protect the store against white vigilantes. Three of the deputies were wounded before the black men guarding the People’s Grocery even realized whom they were firing on. Once they did know, they fled—on the heels of the store’s terrified patrons. Meanwhile, the uninjured deputies retreated, regrouped, and returned to the store, where they arrested a dozen black men, including Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. Moss would later be described in the white press as the ringleader of the attack on th
e deputies, and accused of shooting the most seriously wounded of them. But he does not seem to have even been at the store at the time of the attack. Never mentioned in early accounts of the incident, Moss was, by his own testimony and that of his wife, at home at the time of the shooting.

  However, in the hysteria that ensued, no effort was made either to establish or to investigate Moss’s whereabouts, or those of any of the thirty additional alleged conspirators arrested in the days following the shoot-out. Instead, amid rumors of a massive black uprising, blacks in the Curve were arrested at random, while Memphis whites went on a free-for-all, destroying the People’s Grocery and looting its shelves. Four days later, the armed whites who had descended on the Curve were still not satisfied. Their continuing fury was fed by the sensational coverage of the “Curve riot” in Memphis’s white press. The city was home to two white newspapers—The Appeal-Avalanche and the Memphis Scimitar, both of which published accounts of the “negro desperados” that became more fanciful with each retelling. No longer a grocery store, the People’s Grocery was described as “a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort for thieves and thugs.”3 According to The Appeal-Avalanche, the wounded deputies “had been led into an ambush and subjected to murderous fire by a band of Negroes who were without grievance, and solely activated by race prejudice and a vicious and venomous rancor.”4